LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

"7- ^ ^' 3017 — 
6|ap iiJ{njrig|t Tpx. .,, 

Shelf ..;...^<? ^ 

lEir^'T 

I NITED STATES OF A3IEEI0A. 



BY-WAYS 



AND 



BIRD NOTES 



BY 



MAURICE THOMPSON 



/,/ / 



AUTHOR OF 



"At Love's Extremes," "His Second Cajmpaign," "Songs 

OF P'AiR Weather," "A Tallahassee 

Girl," Etc. 




[ 



NEW YORK 

JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER 
1885 






^\< 



Copyright, 1885, 

BY 

JOHN B. ALDEN 



TROWS 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDINQ COMPANY, 

NEW YORK. 



CONTENTS. 



\ PAGE 

IN THE HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING- 
BIRD 5 

A RED-HEADED FAMILY 23 

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS . 1 4© 

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS : II 5° 

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS : III 59 

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS : IV 66 

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS 75 

BROWSING AND NIBBLING 95 

OUT-DOOR INFLUENCES IN LITERA- 
TURE 105 

A FORTNIGHT IN A PALACE OF REEDS . . 118 

CUCKOO NOTES •■• ^33 

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS 151 

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS 164 



BY-WAYS 

AND 

B I R D-N O T E S 



IN THE HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING- 
BIRD. 

The mocking-bird has been called the 
American nightingale, with a view, no doubt, 
to inflicting a compliment involving the opera- 
tion, known to us all, of damning with faint 
praise. The nightingale presumably is not 
the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds 
immemorial title to preeminence amongst sing- 
ing-birds. The story of Philomela, however, 
as first told, was not an especially pleasing 
one, and the poets made no great use of it. 
Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far 
as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostro- 
phe to the nightingale comparable to Sapplio's 
fragment To the Rose; still the bird has a 
prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and 
upheld by the master romancers of the world. 

To compare the song of any other bird with 
that of the nightingale is like instituting a 
comparison between some poet of to-day and 
Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the 
would-be rival is concerned. The world has 
long ago made up its mind, and when the 
world once does that there is an end, a cul de 



6 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

sac, a stopping-place, of all argument of the 
question. Indeed, it is a very romantic dis- 
tance that separates the bird from most of us. 
Chaucer's groves and Shakespeare's woods 
shake out from their leaves a fragrance that 
reaches us along with a song which is half the 
bird's and half the poet's. We connect the 
nightingale's music with a dream of chivalry, 
troubadours, and mediaeval castles. It is as 
dear to him who has heard it only in the 
changes rung by the Persian, French, and 
English bards as it is to him whose chamber 
window opens on a choice haunt of the bird 
in rural England. 

I might dare to go further and claim that I, 
who have never heard a nightingale sing, can 
say with truth that its music is, in a certain 
way, as familiar to me as the sound of a run- 
ning stream or the sough of a spring breeze. 
I often find myself reluctantly shaking off 
something like a recollection of having some- 
where, in some dim old grove, heard the voice 
that Keats imprisoned in his matchless ode. 
There is a sort of aerial perspective in the 
mere name of the nightingale ; it is like some 
of those classical allusions which bring into a 
modern essay suggestions with an "infinite dis- 
tance in them. So thoroughly has this been 
felt that it may safely be said that the nightin- 
gale has been more frequently mentioned by 
our American writers, good, bad, and indiffer- 
ent, than any one of our native birds. No 
doubt it ought to provoke a smile, this gushing 
about a music one has never heard ; but, like 
the music of the spheres and the roar of the 
ocean, the nightingale's voice is common 
property, and we all take it as a sort of hered- 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 7 

itary music, descending to us by immemorial 
custom. Its notes are echoing within us, and 
we feel their authenticity though in fact we 
know as Httle about the bird as chemists do 
about Geber. How shall we doubt that the 
bird whose song inspired Keats to write that 
masterpiece of English poetry is indeed a 
wonderful musician ? Shakespeare and rare 
Ben Jonson'and Burns and Scott and Shelley 
and Byron heard this same song ; it was just 
as clear and sweet as it is now when Chaucer 
was telling his rhymed tales, when Robin 
Hood was in the greenwood, even when the 
Romans made their first invasion. 

In a general way, we do not think of the 
nightingale having a nest and rearing a brood 
and dying. It is simply the incomparable 
nightingale, philomela, rossignol, or whatever 
the name may be, — a bird that has been sing- 
ing in rose-gardens and orange-orchards and 
English woods night after night for thousands 
of years without a rival. Its song is to the 
imagination of all of us 

"L'hymne flottant des nuits d'ete." 

as Lamartine has expressed it. So it can 
easily be understood how hard a struggle our 
American mocking-bird is going to have before 
it reaches a place in the world's esteem beside 
the nightingale. Nor is it my purpose to do 
anything with a special view to aid it in the 
struggle; but I have studied our bird in all 
its haunts and in all seasons, with a view to a 
most intimate acquaintance with its habits, its 
song, and its character. 

To begin with, the name mocking-bird^ is a 
heavy load for any bird to bear. Unmusical 



8 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

as il is, the worst feature of such an appella- 
tion is the idea of flippancy and ill-breeding 
that it conveys. To " mock " is to imitate 
with an ill-natured purpose, to jeer at, to ridi- 
cule; it was for mocking that bad children 
were made food for bears. Such a name 
carries with it a shadow of something repel- 
lant, and no jDoet can ever rescue it, as a 
name, from its meaning and its eight harsh 
consonants. It would indeed require some 
centuries of romantic and charming associa- 
tions to make of it a name by which to con- 
jure, as in the case of the nightingale. The 
bird, with almost any other name than mock- 
ing-bird, would fare much better at the hands 
of artists and poets, and might hope, if birds 
may hope at all, finally to gain the meed of 
praise it so richly deserves. 

In a beautiful little valley among the moun- 
tains of North Georgia I first began to study 
the mocking-bird in its wild state. It was not 
a very common bird there, just rare enough to 
keep one keenly interested in its habits. I 
had great trouble in finding a nest. Many a 
delightful tramp through the thorny thickets 
and wild orchards of plum-trees ended in noth- 
ing, before my eyes discovered the loose sticks 
and matted midribs of leaves which usually 
make up the songster's home. The haw-tree, 
several varieties of which ""row in the glades 
of what is known as the Cherokee Region, is a 
favorite nesting-place, and so is the honey- 
locust tree, which is also much chosen by the 
shrike or butcher-bird. There is so strong a 
resemblance in colors and size between this 
shrike and the mocking-bird that one is often 
mistaken for the other by careless observers, 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 9 

hence in some neighbcrhoods, I have found a 
strong prejudice existing against the mocking- 
bird on account of the fiendish habits of the 
shrike. 

A mountain lad once led me over a con- 
siderable mountain and down into a wild dell 
to show me a nest in a thorn tree, where he 
was sure I should find every evidence that a 
mocking-bird was a soulless monster, murder- 
ing little pee-wee fly-catchers and warblers, 
and impaling them on thorns out of sheer 
wantonness. I felt sure it was a shrike, but 
the boy said he knew better. Didn't he know 
a mocking-bird when he saw it? He had 
heard it sing and " mock " all the birds in the 
thickets around, and had also seen it doing its 
brutal work. Boys are sometimes very close 
and reliable in their observations, and this one 
was an inveterate hunter, and so stoutly as- 
serted his knowledge that I was induced to 
test his accuracy by going with him to the 
place he called Mocking-Bird Hollow. Of 
course the nest was that of a shrike, but a 
number of mocking-birds were breeding in the 
immediate vicinity, hence the mistake. 

The mocking-bird does not appear to be a 
strictly migratory bird, its range being much 
narrower than that of the brown-thrush, the 
cat-bird, and the wood-thrush. I have never 
been able to find it a regular visitant in the 
West north of Tennessee, though I have no 
reason to doubt that it comes at times much 
farther, even into the Ohio valley. In the 
mountain valleys it is extremely wary and shy, 
its habits approaching very close to those 
attributed to the nightingale of England. It 
chooses lonely and almost inaccessible nest- 



10 BY-WAYS AND B IRD-NO TES. 

ing places, and will not sing if at all disturbed. 
Often, while I have been lying on the ground 
in some secluded glade, I have heard, far in 
the night, a sudden gush of melody begun by 
one bird and echoed by another and another 
all around me, filling the balmy air of spring 
with a half-cheerful, half-plaintive medley. 
This is more common when the moon shines, 
but I have heard it when the night was black. 
At several points near the coast of the 
Carolinas I have found the mocking-bird ap- 
parently a resident, and yet, so far South as 
Savannah, Georgia, it seems to shrink from the 
occasional midwinter rigors. In the hills near 
the Alabama River, not far from Montgomery, 
it is certainly resident, but I found it a much 
shyer bird there than in the thickets along the 
bayous of Louisiana. Early in the winter of 
1883 I made a most careful search for the 
mocking-bird in Pensacola, Florida, and its 
environs, but found none. I was told that the 
bird would appear about the last of February. 
At Marianna, Florida, and along the line of 
the road thence to the Appalachicola River, I 
saw it frequently in midwinter. On the Gulf 
Coast, down as far as Punta Rassa, and across 
the peninsula to the Indian River country, in 
the orange, lemon, and citron groves, in the 
bay thickets,' and even in the sandy pine 
woods, I noted it quite frequently. In this 
semi-tropical country it is not so shy and so 
chary of its song, as it is farther north. Near 
the mouth of the St. Mark's River, as I lay un- 
der a small tree, a mocking-bird came and lit 
on the top of a neighboring bush, and sang for 
me its rarest and most wonderful combination, 
palled by the negroes the "dropping song." 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. ii 

Whoever has closely observed the bird has 
noted its " mounting song," a very frequent 
performance, wherein the songster begins on 
the lowest branch of a tree and appears liter- 
ally to mount on its music, from bough to 
bough, until the highest spray of the top is 
reached, where it will sit for many minutes 
flinging upon the air an ecstatic stream of 
almost infinitely varied vocalization. But he 
who has never heard the " dropping song " 
has not discovered the last possibility of the 
mocking-bird's voice. I have never found 
any note of this extremely interesting habit of 
the bird by any ornithologist, a habit which is, 
I suspect, occasional, and connected with the 
most tender part of the mating season. It is, 
in a measure, the reverse of the "mounting 
song," beginning where the latter leaves off. 
I have heard it but four times, when I was 
sure of it, during all my rambles and patient 
observations in the chosen haunts of the bird ; 
once in North Georgia, twice in the immediate 
vicinity of Tallahassee, Florida, and once 
near the St. Mark's River, as above men- 
tioned. I have at several other times heard 
the song, as I thought, but not being able to 
see the bird, or clearly distinguish the peculiar 
notes, I cannot register these as certainly cor- 
rect. My attention was first called to this in- 
teresting performance by an aged negro man, 
who, being with me on an egg-hunting expe- 
dition, cried out one morning, as a burst of 
strangely rhapsodic music rang from a haw 
thicket near our extemporized camp, " Lis'n, 
mars, lis'n, dar, he's a droppin', he's a-drop- 
pin', sho's yo' bo'n!" I could not see the 



12 BY- VVA YS AND BIKD-NO TES. 

bird, and before I could get my attention 
rightly fixed upon the song it had ended. 

Something of the rare aroma, so to speak, 
of the curiously modulated trills and quavers 
lingered in my memory, however, along with 
Uncle Jo's graphic description of the bird's 
actions. After that I was on the lookout for 
an opportunity to verify the negro's state- 
ments. 

I have not exactly kept the date of my first 
actual observation, but it was late in April, or 
very early in May; for the crab-apple trees, 
growing wild in the Georgian hills, were in 
full bloom, and spring had come to stay. I 
had been out since the first sparkle of day- 
light. The sun was rising, and I had been 
standing quite still for some minutes, watch- 
ing a mocking-bird that was singing in a 
snatchy, broken way, as it fluttered about in a 
thick-topped crab-apple tree thirty yards dis- 
tant from me. Suddenly the bird, a fine speci- 
men, leaped like a flash to the highest spray 
of the tree and began to flutter in a trembling, 
peculiar way, with its wings half-spread and 
its feathers puffed out. Almost immediately 
there came a strange, gurgling series of notes, 
liquid and sweet, that seemed to express utter 
rapture. Then the bird dropped, with a back- 
ward motion, from the spray, and began to 
fall slowly and somewhat spirally down through 
the bloom-covered boughs. Its progress was 
quite like that of a bird wounded to death by a 
shot, clinging here and there to a twig, quiver- 
ing and weakly striking with its v/ings as it fell, 
but all the time it was pouring forth the most 
exquisite gushes and trills of song, not at all 
like its usual medley of improvised imitations 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKIAtG-BIRD. 13 

but strikingly, almost startlingly, individual 
and unique. The bird appeared to be dying 
of an ecstasy of musical inspiration. The 
lower it fell the louder and more rapturous 
became its voice, until the song ended on the 
ground in a burst of incomparable vocal power. 
It remained for a short time, after its song 
was ended, crouching where it had fallen, with 
its wings outspread, and quivering and pant- 
ing as if utterly exhausted ; then it leaped 
boldly into the air and flew away into an ad- 
jacent thicket. 

Since then, as I have said, three other op- 
portunities have been afforded me of witness- 
ing this curiously pleasing exhibition of bird- 
acting. I can half imagine what another 
ode Keats might have written had his eyes 
seen and his ears heard that strange, fasci- 
nating, dramatically rendered song. Or it 
might better have suited Shelley's powers of ex- 
pression. It is said that the grandest bursts of 
oratory are those which contain a strong trace 
of a reserve of power. This may be true ; but 
is not the best song that wherein the voice 
sweeps, with the last expression of ecstasy, 
from wave to wave of music until with a su- 
preme effort it wreaks its fullest power, thus 
ending in a victory over the final obstacle, as 
if with its utmost reach .? Be this as it may, 
whoever may be fortunate enough to hear the 
mocking-bird's "dropping song," and at the 
same time see the bird's action, will at once 
have the idea of genius, pure and simple, sug- 
gested to him. 

The high, beautiful country around Talla- 
hassee, in Middle Florida, is the paradise of 
mocking-birds. I am surprised to find this 



14 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

region so little visited, comparativ-ely speaking, 
by those who really desire to know all that is 
beautiful and interesting in our country. Per- 
haps it is because the places most frequented 
by the mocking-bird have not been sought by 
those deeply interested in bird-habits and 
history, that so little is known of the most 
striking traits of its character. Quite certain 
it is that no monograph exists which gives to 
the general reader any approximate idea of 
our great American singer. I must say just 
here that the mocking-bird's song in captivity, 
strong and sweet as it is, and its voice from 
the cage, liquid, flexible, and pure, are not 
in the least comparable to what they are in the 
open-air freedom of a Southern grove. If you 
would hear these at their best, and they are 
truly worth going a long journey to hear, you 
must seek some secluded grove in Southern 
Alabama, Georgia, or Middle Florida about 
the last of March or the first of April, when 
spring is in its prime and the gulf breezes are 
flowing over all that semi-tropical region. 

It is a silly notion, without any foundation 
in fact, that the mocking-bird in its wild state 
is a mere mimic, without a song of its own. 
The truth is that all birds get their notes, as 
we get our language, by imitating what they 
hear. Very few of them, however, are suffi- 
ciently gifted mentally and vocally to be able 
to pass the limitation of immemorial heredity, 
or to feel any impulse toward any attainments 
of voice beyond what they catch as younglings 
from their parents. Hence, as a rule, the 
young bird is satisfied with the pipes and calls 
caught from its immediate ancestors. No 
doubt a lack of finely developed vocal organs 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 15 

has much to do with this. But the mocking- 
bird, the brown-thrush, and the cat-bird are 
notable exceptions to the rule. Nature has 
endowed them with an instinctive impulse 
toward a cultivation of their vocal powers, as 
well as with voices capable of wonderful 
achievements. 

A mocking-bird reared in captivity becomes 
much more a mere mimic than the wild bird, 
and yet, so strong is the hereditary tendency, 
the caged bird will perfectly sound the notes 
of a grossbeak or a blue-jay without ever hav- 
ing heard them. I have heard a mocking-bird, 
reared in a cage in Indiana, utter with singu- 
lar accuracy the cry of the Southern wood- 
pecker {Piciis querulus), a bird I have never 
seen north of the Cumberland Mountains. 

Many little incidents noted in the woods 
and in the orchards haunted by the mocking- 
bird have led me to conclude that a genuine 
sense of the importance of singing well in- 
spires some of its most remarkable efforts. 
One morning in March, 1881, I looked out of 
a window in the old City Hotel at Talla- 
hassee, and witnessed a pitched battle of song 
between a brown -thrush and a mocking-bird. 
In the grounds about the Capitol building 
across the street stood some venerable oak 
trees just beginning to leave out. The birds 
had each chosen a perch on the highest prac- 
ticable point of a tree. They were not more 
than fifty feet apart, and with swelling throats 
were evidently vying fiercely with each other. 
This gave me the best possible opportunity of 
comparing their styles and methods of expres- 
sion. To my ear the brown-thrush in the wild 
state is a sweeter singer than any caged mock- 



1 6 BV-IVAVS AND BIRD- NO TES. 

ing-bird ; but when both are free, the latter is 
infinitely superior at every point. There is a 
wide variety of pure flute-notes expressed by 
the wild mocking-bird. These notes become 
vitiated in captivity and their tone degraded 
to the level of mere mellow piping. In the 
hedges of Cherokee rose that grew along the 
old Augustine road east of Tallahassee, mock- 
ing-birds were so numerous that their songs, 
mingling together, made a strange din which 
could be heard a long way on a still morning. 

I have already spoken of the injustice done 
the mocking-bird by the name given it, but at 
this point I may say that other American song 
birds of a superior order have suffered even 
more from this cause. Cat-bird and th7'ashe?% 
— what names to be embalmed in poetry and 
romance ! It required all the genius of Emer- 
son successfully to use a titmouse as the sub- 
ject for a poem. If Bryant's Lines to a Water- 
fowl had been addressed to a duck or a snake- 
bird, one would scarcely be content to accept 
the poem as perfect. A name certainly has 
an intrinsic value. 

Mr. Cable in his powerful novel, Dr. Sevier, 
speaks of the mocking-bird's morning note as 
unmusical. At certain seasons of the year the 
bird's voice is not especially pleasing, but this 
is not in song-time. Early morning and the 
twilight of evening in the spring call forth its 
most charm.ing powers. Its night song is 
sweet and peculiarly effective, but except on 
rare occasions in the nesting season, when the 
moon is very brilliant the nocturnal notes are 
pitched in a minor key and the voice is less 
flexible and brilliant, as if the bird were sing- 
ing in its sleep. 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 17 

In Florida and in the valley of the Alabama, 
I observed the mocking-bird assuming a famil- 
iarity with man very closely approaching volun- 
tary domestication. A pair had their nest in 
a small vine-covered peach-tree close to the 
window of a room for some weeks occupied by 
me. They seemed not in the least disturbed 
when I boldly watched them, though occasion- 
ally the male bird was inclined to scold if I 
raised the window. Every morning, just at 
the peep of dawn, the singing began, and was 
kept up at intervals all day. The house was 
a mere cabin with unchinked cracks. All out- 
door sounds came in freely. The Suwanee 
River, made famous by the Old Folks at 
Home, rippled near, and the heavy perfume of 
magnolia flowers filled the air. My vigorous 
exercise in the woods and fields by day, which 
was sometimes continued far into the night, 
made me sleep soundly, but very often I was 
aroused sufficiently to be aware of a nocturne, 
all the sweeter to my half-dreaming sense on 
account of its plaintive and desultory render- 
ing. 

In the neighborhood of Thomasville, Geor- 
gia, a mocking-bird's nest, built in a pear- 
tree, was close to a kitchen door, where ser- 
vants were all day passing in and out within 
ten or twelve feet of the sitting bird. The 
brood was hatched, and the young taken by a 
negro and sold to a New York tourist for 
twenty dollars. The birds tore up their nest 
as soon as it was robbed, and appeared greatly 
excited for a few days ; but one morning the 
singing began again, and soon after a new 
nest was built a little higher up in the same 
tree. 

2 



i8 B y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

It has been told of the mocking-birds that, 
in Louisiana and other Southern regions, when 
such of them as have taken a summer jaunt to 
New England or Pennsylvania return to the 
magnolia and orange groves in late autumn, 
they are attacked by their resident brethren. 
My observation has not tended to verify this. 
Nor can I bear testimony to the bravery and 
fighting qualities of the mocking-bird. The 
blue-bird whips it, driving it hither and yon at 
will, though not more than half its size. It is, 
however, a famous scold and blusterer, accom- 
plishing a good deal by fierce threats and 
savage demonstrations. I do not believe the 
story about it killing snakes. It would be a 
very small and weak reptile that such a bird 
could kill, being so poorly armed for warlike 
exploits. 

On a pedestrian tour through the loveliest 
and loneliest part of Middle Florida, I was 
struck with the strong contrast between the 
negroes and the white people as to the extent 
and accuracy of their ornithological knowledge, 
a contrast almost as marked as that of color. 
I could get no information from the whites. 
They had never paid any attention to mocking- 
birds. The subject appeared to them too 
slight and trivial to be vi^orth any study. But 
the negroes were sometimes enthusiastic, al- 
ways interested and interesting. Somehow 
there has always seemed to me a fine touch of 
power in the way a cabin, a few banana-stalks, 
a plum-tree or two, and a straggling bower of 
grape-vines get themselves together for the 
use of indolent negroes and luxury-loving 
mocking-birds. I have fancied it, or else there 
is a marked preference shown by the songster 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 19 

for the cots of the freedmen, and there can 
be no doubting that a warm feeling for the 
bird is nursed by the ordinary negro. 

As I have suggested, the nature of the 
mocking-bird is that of a resident more than 
that of a migratory bird, and I am inclined to 
name its true habitat semi-tropical. Even so 
far South as Macon, Ga., and in the region of 
Montgomery, Ala., the chilly days of midwin- 
ter are sufficient to drive the birds to heavy 
cover. In fact, a large majority of the spe- 
cies of Mimus {Mimus polyglottus being the 
scientific name of the mocking-bird) are to be 
found in South America and in the tropical 
islands of the Atlantic. 

The plantation negroes used to have a say- 
ing which might serve the turn of Mr. Harris 
or Mr. Macon : " Takes a red-hot sun fo' ter 
bri'l de mockin'-bird's tongue, but er mighty 
small fros' er gwine ter freeze 'im froat up 
solid." Mr. Fred. A. Ober, in his report of 
explorations made in the Okeechobee region, 
does not mention seeing the mocking-bird, but 
it is there, nevertheless, or was in 1867. I re- 
member seeing a fine fellow flying about in 
some small bushes, near the remains of a de- 
serted cabin, on the north-eastern shore of the 
lake. I saw some paroquets at the same 
place. 

On what is known as the Dauphine Way, 
running west from Dauphine Street in Mobile, 
mocking-birds used to be numerous, nesting in 
the groves on either side and filling the air 
with their songs. Whoever has walked out 
on this lovely road will remember a low, old- 
fashioned brick house, no doubt a plantation 
residence one day, with a row of queer little 



20 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

dormer windows on the roof in front, and 
graduated parapets to hide the gables, a long 
lean-to veranda and a row of chimneys, a dark, 
heavy-looking building near the south side of 
the Way. In a small tree just east of this 
house used to sing a mocking-bird whose voice 
was as much above the average of his kind as 
Patti's voice is above the average woman's 
voice. If one could get a caged bird to sing 
as that one did, he might profitably advertise 
it for concerts. A friend and I sat down 
across the Way from the house, and, while the 
gulf breeze poured over us and the bird music 
filled our ears, got a sketch of the charmingly 
picturesque old place ; but somehow we could 
not put in the song of the wonderful mocking- 
bird. 

Bird-fanciers and bird-buyers may profit by 
what I now whisper to them, to wit : the best- 
voiced mocking-birds, without a doubt, are 
those bred in Middle Florida and Southern 
Alabama. I have no theory in connection 
with this statement of a fact ; but if I were 
going to risk the reputation of our country on 
the singing of a mocking-bird against a Euro- 
pean nightingale, I should choose my cham- 
pion from the hill-country in the neighborhood 
of Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mo- 
bile. 

No doubt proper food has much to do with 
the development of the bird in all its parts, 
and it may be that the dry, fertile, chocolate- 
tinted hills that swell up along the Gulf Coast 
produce just the berries, insects, and other tid- 
bits needed for the mocking-bird's fullest 
growth. Then, perhaps, the climate best suits 
the bird's nature. Be this as it may, I have 



HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 21 

found no birds elsewhere to compare with 
those in that belt of country about thirty miles 
wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by 
way of Tallahassee, to some miles west of Mo- 
bile. Nor is there anywhere a more interest- 
ing country to him who delights in pleasant 
wildwood rambles, unusual scenery, and a 
wonderful variety of birds and flowers in their 
season. 

Most of our descriptive ornithologists have 
taken great pains to assure their readers that 
the American mocking-bird is very plain, if 
not positively unattractive in its plumage. But 
to my eye the graceful little fellow, especially 
when flying, is an object of real beauty. 
There is a silver-white flash to his wings, along 
with a shimmer of gray, and a dusky, shadowy 
twinkle, so to speak, about his head and shoul- 
ders, as you see him fluttering through the top 
of an orange tree or climbing, in his peculiar 
zigzag way, the gnarled boughs of a fig-bush. 
His throat and breast are the perfection of 
symmetry, and his eyes are clear pale gold, 
bright and alert. The eggs of the mocking- 
bird are delicate and shapely, having a body 
color of pale, ashy green tinged with blue and 
blotched with brown. The eggs of the shrike 
closely resemble those of the mocking-bird, so 
that the amateur naturaUst is often deceived. 
The nests of the two birds are also very much 
alike in shape and materials, and the places in 
which they are usually found are exactly simi- 
lar, a lonely thorny tree being preferred, if in 
the wildwood, and a pear-tree or a plum-tree 
if in an orchard. 

I am quite sure that every one who has 
studied, or who hereafter may study, the 



22 BV-IVAVS AJVB BIRD- NO TES. 

mocking-bird in its proper haunts will agree 
with me that its voice is something far more 
marvellous than has ever been dreamed of by 
those who have heard it only from the cage ; 
and especially will the lover of high dramatic 
art and consummate individuality of manner 
and vocalization be charmed with the bird's 
exquisite " dropping song," if once he has the 
good fortune to witness its delivery and hear 
its rhythmic gushes of rapture. 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 

" Ce'tingly I ken, ce'tingly, seh," said my 
Cracker host, taking down his long flint-lock 
rifle from over the cabin door and slipping his 
frowzy head through the suspension-strap of 
his powder-horn and bullet-pouch. " Ce'tingly, 
seh, I ken cyarry ye ter wha' them air birds 
hed their nestis las' yer." 

I had passed the night in the cabin, and now 
as I recall the experience to mind, there comes 
the grateful fragrance of pine wood to empha- 
size the memory. Corn " pones " and broiled 
chicken, fried bacon and sweet potatoes, 
strong coffee and scrambled eggs — a break- 
fast, indeed, to half persuade one that a 
Cracker is a bon vivant — had just been eaten, 
I was standing outside the cabin on the rude 
door-step. Far off through the thin pine woods 
to the eastward, where the sun was beginning 
to flash, a herd of " scrub " cattle were formed 
into a wide skirmish line of browsers, led by 
an old cow, whose melancholy bell clanged in 
time to her desultory movements. Near by, 
to the westward, lay one of those great gloomy 
swamps, so common in Southeastern Georgia, 
so repellant and yet so fascinating, so full of 
interest to the naturalist, and yet so little ex- 
plored. The perfume of yellow jasmine was 
in the air, along with those indescribable 
woodsy odors which almost evade the sense 
of smell, and yet so pleasingly impress it. A 
rivulet, slow, narrow, and deep, passed near the 



24 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

front of the cabin, with a faint, dreamy mur- 
mur and crept darkling into the swamp be- 
tween dense brakes of cane, and bay-bushes. 

" Ye-as, seh, I ken mek er bee-Une to that 
air ole pine snag. Hit taint more'n er half er 
mile out yender," continued my host and vol- 
unteer guide, as we climbed the little worm- 
fence that inclosed the house ; " but I alius 
called 'em air birds woodcocks ; didn't know 
'at they hed any other name ; alius thut 'at a 
Peckwood wer' a leetle, tinty, stripedy feller ; 
never hyeard er them air big ole woodcocks 
a bein' called Peckwoods." 

He led and I followed into the damp, m6ss- 
scented shadows of the swamp, under cypress 
and live-oak and through slender fringes of 
cane. We floundered across the coffee-colored 
stream, the water cooHng my india-rubber 
wading-boots above the knees, climbed over 
great walls of fallen tree-boles, crept under 
low-hanging festoons of wild vines, and at 
length found ourselves wading rather more 
than ankle-deep in one of those shallow 
cypress lakes of which the larger part of the 
Okefenokee region is formed. I thought it a 
very long half-mile before we reached a small 
tussock whereon grew, in the midst of a dense 
underbrush thicket, .some enormous pine 
trees. 

" Ther'," said the guide, " thet air snag air 
the one. Sorter on ter tother side ye'll see 
the hole, 'bout twenty foot up. Kem yer, I'll 
show hit ter ye." 

The " snag " was a stump some fifty feet 
tall, barkless, smooth, almost as white as chalk, 
the decaying remnant of what had once been 
the grandest pine on the tussock. 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 25 

" Hello, yer' ! Hit's ben to work some more 
sence I wer' yer' las' time. Hit air done dug 
another hole ! " 

As he spoke he pointed indicatively, with 
his long, knotty forefinger. I looked and saw 
two large round cavities, not unlike immense 
auger-holes, running darkly into the polished 
surface of the stump, one about six feet below 
the other ; the lower twenty-five feet above the 
ground. Surely it was no very striking pict- 
ure, this bare, weather-whitened column, with 
its splintered top and its two orifices, and yet 
I do not think it was a weakness for me to 
feel a thrill of delight as I gazed at it. How 
long and how diligently I had sought the home 
of Campephilus priiidpalis, the great king of 
the red-headed family, and at last I stood be- 
fore its door ! 

At my request, the kind Cracker now left 
me alone to prosecute my observations. 

" Be in ter dinner t " he inquired as he 
turned to go. 

" No ; supper," I responded. 

"Well, tek cyare ev yerself," and, off he 
went into the thickest part of the cypress. 

I waited awhile for the solitude to regain its 
equilibrium after the slashing tread of my 
friend had passed out of hearing; then I stole 
softly to the stump, and tapped on it with the 
handle of my knife. This I repeated several 
times. Campephilus was not at home, for if he 
had been I should have seen a long, strong, 
ivory-white beak thrust out of the hole up 
there, followed by a great red-crested head 
turned sidewise so as to let fall upon me the 
glint of an iris unequalled by that of any other 
bird in the world. He had gone out early. I 



26 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

should have to wait and watch , but first I sat- 
isfied myself by a simple method that my 
watching would probably not be in vain. A 
little examination of the ground at the base of 
the stump showed me a quantity of fresh wood- 
fragments, not unlike very coarse saw-dust 
scattered over the surface. This assured me 
that one of the excavations above was a new 
one, and that a nest was either building or had 
been finished but a short while. So I hastily 
hid myself on a log in a clump of bushes, dis- 
tant from the stump about fifty feet, whence I 
could plainly see the holes. 

One who has never been out alone in a 
Southern swamp can have no fair understand- 
mg of its loneliness, solemnity and funereal 
sadness of effect. Even in the first gush of 
Sprmg — it was now about the sixth of April — 
I felt the weight of something like eternity in 
the air — not the eternity of the future but the 
eternity of the past. Everything around me 
appeared old, sleepy, and musty, despite the 
fresh buds, tassels, and flower-spikes. What 
can express dreariness so effectually as the 
long moss of those damp woods .? I imagined 
that the few little birds I saw flitting here and 
there in the tree tops were not so noisy and 
joyous as they would be when, a month later, 
their northward migration should bring them 
into our greening northern woods. As the 
sun mounted, however, a cheerful twitter ran 
with the gentle breeze through the bay thickets 
and magnolia clumps, and I recognized a 
number of familiar voices ; then suddenly the 
gavel of Campephilus sounded sharp and 
strong a quarter-mile away. A few measured 
raps, followed by a rattling drum-call, a space 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 27 

of silence rimmed with receding echoes, and 
then a trumpet-note, high, full, vigorous, al- 
most startling, cut the air with a sort of broad- 
sword sweep. Again the long-roll answered, 
from a point nearer me, by two or three ham- 
mer-like raps on the resonant branch of some 
dead cypress-tree. The king and queen were 
coming to their palace. I waited patiently, 
knowing that it was far beyond my power to 
hurry their movements. It was not long be- 
fore one of the birds, with a rapid cackling 
that made the wood rattle, came over my head, 
and went straight to the stump, where it lit, 
just below the lower hole, clinging gracefully 
to the trunk. It was a superb specimen — the 
female, and I suspected that she had come to 
leave an egg. I could have killed her easily 
with the little sixteen-gauge breech-loader at 
my side, but I would not have done the act 
for all the stuffed birds in the country. I had 
come as a visitor to this palace, with the hope 
of making the acquaintance I had so long de- 
sired, and not as an assassin. She was quite 
unaware of me, and so behaved naturally, her 
large gold-amber eyes glaring with that wild 
sincerity of expression seen in the eyes of but 
few savage things. 

After a little while the male came bounding 
through the air, with that vigorous galloping 
flight common to all our woodpeckers, and lit 
on a fragmentary projection at the top of the 
stump. He showed larger than his mate, and 
his aspect was more fierce, almost savage. 
The green-black feathers near his shoulders, 
the snow-white lines down his neck, and the 
tall red crest on his head, all shone with great 
brilliancy, whilst his ivory beak gleamed like a 



28 B V- WA YS' A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

dagger. He soon settled for me a question 
which had long been in my mind. With two 
or three light preliminary taps on a hard heart- 
pine splinter, he proceeded to beat the regular 
woodpecker drum-call — that long rolling rattle 
made familiar to us all by the common red- 
head {Melanerpes erythrocephaliis) and our 
other smaller woodpeckers. This peculiar 
call is not, in my opinion, the result of elasticity 
or springiness in the wood upon which it is 
performed, but is effected by a rapid, spas- 
modic motion of the bird's head, imparted by a 
v^Dluntary muscular action. I have seen the 
common Red-head make a soundless call on a 
fence-stake where the decaying wood was 
scarcely hard enough to prevent the full en- 
trance of his beak. His head went through 
the same rapid vibration, but no sound accom- 
panied the performance. Still, it is resonance 
in the wood that the bird desires, and it keeps 
trying until a good sounding-board is found. 

It was very satisfying to me when the superb 
King of the Woodpeckers— //<r 7ioir a bee biane, 
as the great French naturalist named it — went 
over the call, time after time, with grand effect, 
letting go, between trials, one or two of his 
triumphant trumpet-notes. Hitherto I had 
not seen the Campephilus do this, though I 
had often heard what I supposed to be the call. 
As I crouched in my hiding-place and furtively 
watched the proceedings, I remember compar- 
ing the birds and their dwelling to some half- 
savage lord and lady and their isolated castle 
of medieval days. A twelfth-century bandit 
nobleman might have gloried in trigging him- 
self in such apparel as my ivory-billed wood- 
pecker wore. What a perfect athlete he ap- 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 29 

peared to be, as he braced himself for an ef- 
fort which was to generate a force sufficient to 
hurl his heavy head and beak back and forth 
at a speed of about twenty-eight strokes to 
the second ! 

All of our woodpeckers, pure and simple — 
that is, all of the species in which the wood- 
pecker character has been preserved almost 
unmodified — have exceedingly muscular heads 
and strikingly constricted necks ; their beaks 
are nearly straight, wedge-shaped, fluted or 
ribbed on the upper mandible, and their nos- 
trils are protected by hairy or feathery tufts. 
Their legs are strangely short in appearance, 
but are exactly adapted to their need, and their 
tail-feathers are tipped with stiff points. These 
features are all fully developed in the Campe- 
philus pn7icipalis^ the bill especially showing a 
size, strength and symmetrical beauty truly 
wonderful. 

The stiff pointed tail-feathers of the wood- 
pecker serve the bird a turn which I have 
never seen noted by any ornithologist. When 
the bird must strike a hard blow with its bill, 
it does not depend solely upon its neck and 
head ; but, bracing the points of its tail-feath- 
ers against the tree, and rising to the full 
length of its short, powerful legs, and drawing 
back its body, head, and neck to the farthest 
extent, it dashes its bill home with all the 
force of its entire bodily weight and muscle. I 
have seen the ivory-bill, striking thus, burst 
off from almost flinty-hard dead trees frag- 
ments of wood half as large as my hand ; and 
once in the Cherokee hills of Georgia I watched 
a pileated woodpecker {Hylotomns pikatus) dig 
a hole to the very heart of an exceedingly 



30 B Y- IV A YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

tough, green, mountain hickory tree, in order 
to reach a nest of winged ants. The point of 
ingress of the insects was a small hole in a 
punk knot ; but the bird, by hopping down the 
tree tail-foremost and listening, located the 
nest about five feet below, and there it pro- 
ceeded to bore through the gnarled, cross- 
grained wood to the hollow. 

Of all our wild American birds, I have 
studied no other one which combines all of the 
elements of wildness so perfectly in its char- 
acter as does the ivory-billed woodpecker. It 
has no trace whatever in its nature of what 
may be called a tamable tendency. Savage 
liberty is a prerequisite of its existence, and its 
home is the depths of the woods, remotest 
from the activities of civilized man. It is a 
rare bird, even in the most favorable regions, 
and it is almost impossible to get specimens of 
its eggs. Indeed, I doubt if there are a dozen 
cabinets in all the world containing these eggs ; 
but they are almost exactly similar in size, 
color and shape to those of Hylotovius pikatiis, 
the only difference being that the latter are, 
upon close examination, found to be a little 
shorter, and, as I have imagined, a shade less 
semi-transparent porcelain-white, if I may so 
express it. 

The visit of my birds to their home in the 
stump lasted nearly two hours. The female 
went into and out of the hole several times 
before she finally settled herself, as I suppose, 
on her nest. When she came forth at the end 
of thirty or forty minutes, she appeared ex- 
ceedingly happy, cackling in a low, harsh, 
but rather wheedling voice, and evidently 
anxious to attract the attention of the male, 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 31 

who in turn treated her with lofty contempt. 
To him the question of a new egg was not 
worth considering. But when she at last 
turned away from him, and mounting into the 
air, galloped off into the solemn gloom of the 
cypress wood, he followed her, trumpeting at 
the top of his voice. 

Day after day I returned to my hiding-place 
to renew my observation, and, excepting a 
visitation of mosquitoes now and then, noth- 
ing occurred to mar my enjoyment. As the 
weather grew warmer the flowers and leaves 
came on apace, and the swamp became a vast 
wilderness of perfume and contrasting colors. 
Bird songs from migrating warblers, vireos, 
finches and other happy sojourners for a day 
(or mayhap they were all nesting there, I can- 
not say, for I had larger fish to fry), shook the 
wide silence into sudden resonance. Along 
the sluggish little stream between the cane- 
brakes, the hermit-thrush and the cat-bird were 
met by the green heron and the belted king- 
fisher. The snake-bird, too, that veritable 
water-dragon of the South, was there, wrig- 
gling and squirming in the amber-brown pools 
amongst the lily-pads and lettuce. 

At last, one morning, my woodpeckers dis- 
covered me in my hiding-place ; and that was 
the end of all intimacy between us. Thence- 
forth my observations were few and at a long 
distance. No amount of cunning could serve 
me any turn. Go as early as I might, and hide 
as securely as I could, those great yellow eyes 
quickly espied me, and then there would be a 
rapid and long flight away into the thickest 
and most diflicult part of tlie swamp. 

I confess that it was with no little debate 



32 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

that I reached the determination that it was 
my duty to rob that nest in the interest of 
knowledge. It was the first opportunity I ever 
had had to examine an occupied nest of the 
Ca7npephilus principalis, and I felt that it was 
scarcely probable that I should ever again be 
favored with such a chance. With the aid of 
my Cracker host, I erected a rude ladder and 
climbed up into the hole. It was almost 
exactly circular, and nearly five inches in di- 
ameter. With a little axe I began break- 
ing and hacking away the crust of hard outer 
wood. The cavity descended with a slightly 
spiral course, widening a little as it proceeded. 
I had followed it nearly five feet when I found 
a place where it was contracted again, and im- 
mediately below was a sudden expansion, at 
the bottom of which was the nest. Five 
beautiful pure white eggs of the finest old- 
china appearance, delicate, almost transparent, 
exceedingly fragile, and, to the eyes of a 
collector, vastly valuable, lay in a shallow 
bowl of fine chips. But in breaking away the 
last piece of wood-crust, I jerked it a little too 
hard, and those much coveted prizes rolled out 
and fell to the ground. Of course they were 
^' hopelessly crushed," and my feelings with 
them. I would willingly have fallen in their 
stead, if the risk could have saved the eggs. 
I descended ruefully enough, hearing as I did 
so the loud cry of Campephilus battling around 
in the jungle. Once or twice more I went 
back to the spot in early morning, but my 
birds did not appear. I made minute exami- 
nation of the rifled nest, and also tore out the 
other excavation, so as to compare the two. 
They were very much alike, especially in the 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 33 

jug-shape of their lower ends. From a care- 
ful study of all the holes (apparently made by 
Campephilus) that I have been able to find 
and reach in either standing or fallen trees, I 
am led to believe that this jug-shape is pecul- 
iar to the ivory-bill's architecture, as I have 
never found it in the excavations of other 
species, save where the form was evidently the 
result of accident. The depth of the hole 
varies from three to seven feet, as a rule, but I 
found one that was nearly nine feet deep and 
another that was less than two. Our smaller 
woodpeckers, including Hylotoinus pileatus^ 
usually make their excavations in the shape of 
a gradually widening pocket, of which the en- 
trance is the narrowest part. 

It is curious to note that — beginning with the 
ivory-bill and coming down the line of species 
in the scale of size — we find the red mark on 
the head rapidly falling away from a grand 
scarlet crest some inches in height to a mere 
touch of carmine, or dragon's blood, on crown, 
nape, cheek, or chin. The lofty and brilliant 
head-plume of the ivory-bill, his powerful beak, 
his semi-circular claws and his perfectly spiked 
tail, as well as his superiority of size and 
strength, indicate that he is what he is, the 
original type of the woodpecker, and the one 
pure species left to us in America. He is the 
only woodpecker which eats insects and larvae 
(dug out of rotten wood) exclusively. Neither 
the sweetest fruits nor the oiliest grains can 
tempt him to depart one line from his heredit- 
ary habit. He accepts no gifts from man, and 
asks no favors. But the pileated woodpecker, 
just one remove lower in the scale of size, 
strength, and beauty, shows a little tendency 
3 



34 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

towards a grain and fruit diet, and it also often 
descends to old logs and fallen boughs for its 
food — a thing never thought of by the ivory- 
bill. As for the rest of the red-headed family, 
they are degenerate species, though lively, 
clever, and exceedingly interesting. What a 
sad dwarf the little downy woodpecker is when 
compared with the ivory-bill ! and yet to my 
mind it is clear that Picus pubescens is the de- 
generate off-shoot from the grand campephilus 
trunk. 

Our red-headed woodpecker {M. eryihro- 
cephahis) is a genuine American in every sense, 
a plausible, querulous, aggressive, enterpris- 
ing, crafty fellow, who tries every mode of get- 
ting a livelihood, and always with success. He 
is a woodpecker, a nut-eater, a cider-taster, a 
judge of good fruits, a connoisseur of corn, 
wheat, and melons, and an expert fly-catcher as 
well. As if to correspond with his versatility 
of habit, his plumage is divided into four reg- 
ular masses of color. His head and neck are 
crimson, his back, down to secondaries, a 
brilliant black, tinged with green or blue in 
the gloss ; then comes a broad girdle of pure 
white, followed by a mass of black at the tail 
and wing-tips. He readily adapts himself to 
the exigencies of civilized life. I prophecy 
that, within less than a hundred years to come, 
he will be making his nest on the ground, in 
hedges or in the crotches of orchard trees. 
Already he has begun to push his way out into 
our smaller Western prairies, where there is no 
dead timber for him to make his nest-holes in. 
I found a compromise-nest between two fence- 
rails in Illinois, which was probably a fair index 
of the future habit of the red-head. It was 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 35 

formed by pecking away the inner sides of two 
vertical parallel rails, just above a horizontal 
one, upon which, in a cup of pulverized wood, 
the eggs were laid. This was in the prairie 
country between two vast fields of Indian corn. 
The power of sight exhibited by the red- 
headed woodpecker is quite amazing. I have 
seen the bird, in the early twilight of a summer 
evening, start from the highest spire of a very 
tall tree, and fly a hundred yards straight to an 
insect near the ground. He catches flies on 
the wing with as deft a turn as does the great- 
crested fly-catcher. It is not my purpose to 
offer any ornithological theories, in this pa- 
per ; but I cannot help remarking that the far- 
ther a species of woodpecker departs from the 
feeding-habit of the ivory-bill, the more broken 
up are its color-masses, and the more diffused 
or degenerate becomes the typical red tuft on 
the head. The golden-winged woodpecker 
(Colaptes auratus), for instance, feeds much on 
the ground, eating earth-worms, seeds, beetles, 
etc. ; and we find him taking on the colors of 
the ground-birds with a large loss of the char- 
acteristic woodpecker arrangement of plumage 
and color-masses. He looks much more like 
a meadow-lark than like an ivory-bill ! The 
red appears in a delicate crescent, barely no- 
ticeable on the back of the head, and its bill 
is slender, curved, and quite unfit for hard 
pecking. On the other hand, the downy 
woodpecker, and the hairy woodpecker, having 
kept well in the line of the typical feeding 
habit, though seeking their food in places be- 
neath the notice of their great progenitor, 
have preserved in a marked degree an outline 
of the ivory-bill's color-masses, degenerate 



36 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

though they are. The dwarfish, insignificant 
looking Picus pubescens pecking away at the 
stem of a dead iron-weed to get the minute 
larvae that may be imbedded in the pith, when 
com'pared with Ca7?ipephihis principalis drum- 
ming on the bole of a giant cypress-tree, is 
like a Digger Indian when catalogued in a col- 
umn with men like Goethe and Gladstone, 
Napoleon and Lincoln. 

I have been informed that the ivory-bill is 
occasionally found in the Ohio valley ; but I 
have never been able to discover it north of 
the Cumberland range of mountains. It is a 
swamp bird, or rather it is the bird of the high 
timber that grows in low wet soil. Its princi- 
pal food is a large flat-headed timber-worm 
known in the South as borer or satu-worm, 
which it discovers by ear and reaches by dili- 
gent and tremendously effective pecking. A 
Cracker deer-stalker, whom I met at Black- 
shear, Georgia, gave an amusing account of an 
experience he had had in the swamps. He 
said : 

" I had turned in late, and got to sleep on 
a tussock under a big pine, an' slep' tell sun- 
up. Wull, es ther' I laid flat er my back an' 
er snorin' away, kerwhack sumpen tuck me 
in the face an' eyes, jes' like spankin' er 
baby, an' I wuk up with ergret chunk er wood 
ercross my nose, an' er blame ole woodcock 
jest er whangin' erway up in thet pine. My 
nose hit bled an' bled, an' I lied er good mint 
er shoot thet air bird, but I cudn't stan' the 
expense er the thing. Powder'n' lead air 
mighty costive. Anyhow I don't s'pose 'at 
the ole woodcock knowed at hit'd drapped thet 
air fraygment onto me. Ef hit'd er 'peared 



A RED-BEADED FAMILY. t,-j 

like's ef hit wer' 'joyin' the joke any, I wud er 
vshot hit all ter pieces ef I'd er hed ter lived 
on turpentime all winter ! " 

Of the American woodpecker there are more 
than thirty varieties, I believe, nearly every 
one of which bears some trace of the grand 
scarlet crown of the great ivory-billed king of 
them all. The question arises — and I shall 
not attempt to answer it — whether the ivory- 
bill is an example of the highest development, 
from the downy woodpecker, say, or whether 
all these inferior species and varieties are the 
result of degeneracy? Neither Darwin nor 
Wallace has given us the key that certainly 
unlocks this very interesting mystery. 

The sap-drinking woodpeckers (Sphyropicus)^ 
of which there are three or four varieties in 
this country, appear to form the link between 
the fruit-eating and the non-fruit-eating species 
of the red-headed family. From sipping the 
sap of the sugar-maple to testing the flavor of 
a cherry, a service-berry, or a haw-apple, is a 
short and delightfully natural step. How logi- 
cal, too, for a bird, when once it has acquired 
the fruit-eating habit, to quit delving in the 
hard green wood for a nectar so much inferior 
to that which may be had ready bottled in the 
skins of apples, grapes, and berries ! In ac- 
cordance with this rule, M, erythrocephalus 
and Centurus carolitms, though great tipplers, 
are too lazy or too wise to bore the maples, 
preferring to sit on the edge of a sugar-trough, 
furtively drinking therefrom leisurely draughts 
of the saccharine blood of the ready-tapped 
trees. I have seen them with their bills 
stained purple to the nostrils with the rich 
juice of the blackberry, and they quarrel 



38 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

from morning till night over the ripest June- 
apples and reddest cherries, their noise mak- 
ing a Bedlam of the fairest country orchard. 

The woodpecker family is scattered widely 
in our country. In the West Canadian woods 
one meets, besides a number of the commoner 
species, Lewis' woodpecker, a large, beautiful, 
and rare bird. The California species include 
the Nuttall, the Harris, the Cape St. Lucas, the 
white-headed, and several other varieties, all 
showing more or leSs kinship to the ivory-bill. 
Lewis's woodpecker shows almost entirely 
black, its plumage giving forth a strong green- 
ish or bluish lustre. The red on its head is 
softened down to a fine rose-carmine. It is 
a wild, wary bird, flying high, combining in 
its habits the traits of both Hyloto7nus pileatus 
and Campephihis principalis. 

In concluding this paper a general descrip- 
tion of the male ivory-bill may prove accept- 
able to those who may never be able to see 
even a stuffed specimen of a bird which, taken 
in every way, is, perhaps, the most interesting 
and beautiful in America. In size 21 inches 
long, and 33 in alar extent ; bill, ivory white, 
beautifully fluted above, and two and a-half 
inches long; head-tuft, or crest, long and 
fine, of pure scarlet faced with black. Its 
body-color is glossy blue-black, but down its 
slender neck on each side, running from the 
crest to the back, a pure white stripe contrasts 
vividly with the scarlet and ebony. A mass 
of white runs across the back when the wings 
are closed, as in M. erythrocephalus, leaving the 
wing-tips and tail black. Its feet are ash- 
blue, its eyes amber-yellow. The female is 
like the male, save that she has a black crest 



A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 39 

instead of the scarlet. I can think of nothing 
in Nature more striking than the flash of color 
this bird gives to the dreary swamp-landscape, 
as it careers from tree to tree, or sits upon 
some high skeleton cypress-branch and plies 
its resounding blows. The species will prob- 
ably be extinct within a few years."^ 

* Since writing the foregoing, I have made several ex- 
cursions in search of the ivory-bill. Early in January, 
1885, I killed a fine male specimen in a swamp near 
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi ; but was prevented, by an 
accident, from preserving it or making a sketch of it. 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 

I. 

In the season of nest-building, which is also 
the season of song-singing, the by-ways of 
American rural districts offer many attractions 
to the student of nature, and especially to the 
student who hopes to turn his discoveries to 
account in any field of art. Of mere descrip- 
tive matter, so far as it may go in literature, 
and of mere conventionalization, so far as dec- 
orative drawing and painting are concerned, 
the most that was ever possible has, probably, 
already been done ; but the higher forms of art, 
which we have agreed to call creative, must 
get the germs of all new combinations from 
the suggestions of nature. I often have 
thought that even criticism in our country 
would have more virility in it if the critics had 
more time and more inclination to study nature 
outside of cities and greenhouses. How can 
Wordsworth be studied with true critical in- 
sight by one who but vaguely remembers the 
outlines of the woods and fields, the shady 
lanes, and the fine aerial effects of hilly land- 
scape ? When one with open eyes and ears 
goes out into the unshorn ways of nature in the 
creative season — spring — the fine fervor at 
work in birds, and trees, and plants, in the air, 
the earth, and the water, is so manifest that 
one cannot doubt that some subtle element of 
originality is easily obtainable therefrom by in- 
fection. Of course one must be susceptible to 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 41 

the most delicate shades of influence in order 
to get the values of nature. Even the photo- 
graph is to be caught on no plate save the most 
sensitive. 

The other day, when I told a friend that I 
had discovered that the mocking-bird never 
tries to imitate the cooing of a dove, he said, 
"Why, every one knew that long ago." — 
" Show me the record," I demanded ; but he 
could not. " Well, what good can come of 
your discovery, even if you are entitled to the 
credit ? " he rather triumphantly asked. I 
answered that the fact was suggestive ; that it 
had an artistic value. A mournful, desponding 
voice is never attractive to a vigorous, healthy 
nature. Cheerfulness and enthusiasm are 
what win followers for birds as well as men. 
The mocking-bird is a genius who catches from 
nature all its available notes, and combines 
them so as to express the last possibility of 
bird-song, rejecting the moaning of the dove 
and the thumping notes of the yellow-billed 
cuckoo, just as the true poet rejects thoughts 
and words unworthy of his lay. 

It is true that, as the times go, the artist is 
called upon to please a vitiated taste. The 
poet and the novelist must meet the demands 
of the schools and coteries. The precious 
hints and suggestions caught from the provin- 
cial lanes and wood-paths are not considered 
favorable by the metropolitan, as a rule ; but 
out of these must grow, as the plant from the 
seed, the living, lasting values of all art. City 
study is book study, through which the truths 
and beauties of nature are seen at a distance, 
as if through a very delusive atmosphere. To 
test this take your books into the woods of 



42 B V- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

spring, beside a brook, and see how many of 
them will bear reading in the light and pres- 
ence of nature. How tasteless become the 
polished bits of conventional art w^hen we at- 
tempt to enjoy them in the open air, where the 
violets grow, and the wild vine hangs its fes- 
toons ! 

There is another test of the force and vital- 
ity of nature's suggestions known to every ob- 
servant artist. For instance, a sketch of some 
out-door scene, made on the spot, will appear 
to have scarcely any value so long as it can be 
readily compared with the original ; but no 
sooner is the portfolio opened in the studio 
than the sketch discloses, in a marked degree, 
many of the subtlest beauties or peculiarities 
of the living scene. How different in the case 
of a sketch made from the flat ! How diluted 
the power of nature becomes ! 

I was once enjoying a luncheon with a gay 
sylvan party, when the earth served as table 
and a sward of blue-grass as table-cloth. A 
lady who gloried in her collection of rare hand- 
painted china was serving tea to us in cups 
worth more than their weight in gold ; and yet 
when one of these chanced to be set down in 
the midst of a tuft of wild violets it w^as so 
dulled by contrast with the living blooms that 
it really appeared coarse and crude. To study 
nature is the surest way to a kliowledge of 
what art ought to be. Nature is the standard. 
I have little respect for the judgment of the 
critic who measures one man's work by that of 
another. The main question, when any art- 
work is to be critically considered should be. 
Has it the symmetry, force, and vital beauty 
of nature ? 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 43 

It is easy to write about nature ; but to write 
in the spirit of nature, to keep within the limit 
of her rules, is not so easy. So to copy all the 
salient features of a landscape is within the 
power of any painter, but how few can get their 
brushes to spill upon the canvas even a modi- 
cum of what we all may see in the sky, and 
sea, and shore! Greening hedgerows, and 
blooming orchards, the songs of the cat-bird 
and brown thrush, always have something new 
in them. We never see or hear them twice 
from the same point of observation. The 
brook's voice has an infinite variety of tones. 
The sunlight and the cloud shadows are con- 
tinually changing. And so if one can hoard 
up the impressions made by the thousand pass- 
ing moods of spring, they will prove richly 
suggestive when reviewed in the quiet of the 
study. The fine mass of such impressions will 
be found a fresh and fragrant matrix, enclosing 
the perfect crystals of original thought. If it 
is true that one grows like what one contem- 
plates nothing but good can come of lonely 
rambles with nature, and especially in the sea- 
son of quickening germs and tender impulses. 

Those who assert that there is nothing espe- 
cially picturesque or strikingly interesting in 
our rural scenery seem to me deficient either 
in judgment or in the power of observing 
closely. The fact is, it is hard for the profes- 
sional artist or literary man to cut loose from 
an hereditary old-country taint. The far-away, 
the dim, the old in literature and art are 
shrouded in the blue enchantment that hovers 
so tantalizingly on all heights. Standing on 
one mountain-top we look to another longingly ; 
reclining on one bank of a river we dream of 



44 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

the joy awaiting us on the other. It is, in 
other words, apparently almost impossible for 
Americans to fully recognize and appreciate 
the richness of " local color " everywhere of- 
fered at home. If we knew our country as well 
as the English know theirs we should have a 
stronger vital energy in our literature and art. 
Of course we lack that long perspective and rich 
historical atmosphere belonging to old coun- 
tries, but as a nation we are just at that age 
when our genius should find its note. Our 
highways are reasonably good, our lanes and 
by-ways are inviting, our people are hospitable 
and communicative. There is no good reason 
why some tourists, of a more interesting sort 
than tax-gatherers and lightning-rod peddlers, 
should not explore the pastoral districts where 
the richest materials for poetry, romance, and 
art may be had for the taking. 

Rummaging the remote nooks of literature — 
the pages of Chaucer and Spenser, and Izaak 
Walton and Roger Ascham, or Francois Villon 
and Marot and Ronsard, is very pleasing and 
profitable ; but the living, budding, redolent, 
and resonant by-ways of our own neighborhoods 
offer a richer reward. There are moments 
when there are a fragrance and savor, so to 
speak, in the song of a plough-boy heard across 
the fresh-turned fields. One pauses by the 
fence or hedge-row to enjoy what no book or 
picture can quite give. A breath of perfume 
from the blooming top of a wild crab-apple tree, 
along with the hum of the bees at work there, 
is a poem much older than any ballade or trio- 
let, and fresher and sweeter than any song of 
troubadour or any idyl of Greek lyrist. What 
matters it whether one walks, or rides a tri- 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 45 

cycle, or spins noiselessly along on a bicycle, 
so that one keeps one's eyes and ears open ? 
If the body is to be refreshed and strengthened 
by exercise, why not also take pains to recreate 
the mind by filling the memory with pungent 
and healthful data ? A cool draught from a 
country way-side spring, where the calamus 
grows, and the little platoons of sky-blue butter- 
flies arrange themselves on the damp spots, 
might well inspire an ode as good as any Ana- 
creon ever drew from the purple grape-juice. 
The first dragon-fly of the season is always a 
happy discovery for me. 

I know where Longfellow got the sugges- 
tions for his Flower de Luce, the fresher stanzas, 
at least ; for the dew of morning, brushed from 
brook-side flags and meadow weeds, is in them. 
The poem is bookish, too, showing the scholar 
a little too plainly, perhaps ; but it serves to 
urge a current of out-door air over one as one 
reads, and the sound of the mill-flume is in the 
measure. It is always a charming junction 
where ripe scholarship and an accurate and 
loving knowledge of nature flow together. 
From that point onward how the imagination 
is enriched ! 

The poems of Theocritus and the song of 
the cardinal-bird are blended together, and 
something new comes of the mixture. I like to 
follow through a racy poem or essay some elu- 
sive, fascinating trace of the author's recipe. 
It is never quite hidden. 

The impetus given to out-door rambling by 
the advent of cycling must, it seems to me, 
bring some fresh elements into American 
thought. It will, unless we allow the love of 
mere whirling to shut out everything else. I 



46 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

have found a tricycle the most helpful and en- 
joyable thing in exploring the by-ways and 
high-ways of my neighborhood. It has helped 
me to see things that I might not have discov- 
ered had I been on foot, and it has awakened 
sensations never before experienced by me. 
The mere joy in self-propulsion seems to 
sharpen one's vision, and strengthen one's re- 
ceptive faculties. I like to stop and sit in the 
saddle, and peep between the rails of a fence, 
letting my eyes follow the fresh green rows of 



youn 



Indian corn that reach far across the 



level field of dark loam. From the same po- 
sition I can make such notes and sketches as 
will be of use to me in the future. Charming 
physical exercise and pleasing study combined 
make up about the most desirable of all com- 
pounds. When I am tired of pedalling I can 
stop in the shade of a way-side tree and draw 
forth a book to read, or I can watch the effect 
of cloud-shadows and wind-flaws on the rank 
green wheat. Meadow-larks and blue-birds 
preen themselves on the fence-stakes, field- 
sparrows sing in the young oats, yonder or- 
chard rings with the medley of the cat-bird. 
Here is a good place to test the qualities of a 
book as an out-door companion. One can find 
out how its pages will accord with certain 
phases of nature, so to speak. Ten to one what 
had seemed quite perfect, read in the atmos- 
phere of the library, will fall off to a mere skel- 
eton in the open air. I have found that, 
strange as it may seem, the poems of Burns 
lose something by out-door reading, whilst cer 
tain passages of Tennyson, Browning, and 
Emerson reach out and gather an increment of 
freshness from pastoral surroundings. The 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 47 

humorists, as a rule, require to be read within 
the limitations of four walls. Nature is always 
in earnest. 

A novel that will bear the sunlight and the 
winds and the bird-songs may be put down as 
a thoroughly good one. Short, crisp stories, 
not too tragic, having strong local color and 
bright conversations, stand this test very well. 
Our magazines often fall into the error of 
printing, during the out-door season, light 
society stories of city life ; these fade into col- 
orless and tasteless films when read on the 
beach, or in the open country. I sometimes 
read French novels out-of-doors, merely for the 
antiseptic effect that the sun and air have on 
the offensive passages ; but at best I often find 
myself glad that American birds and flowers do 
not understand French. 

We Americans are too fast with whatever 
we undertake. Our horses must trot " below 
fifteen," our yachts must go like a hurricane ; 
and when we ride bicycles or tricycles we must 
run a hundred miles in the shortest possible 
space of time. Now, a tourist who hopes to see 
anything or hear anything worth remembering 
must go slowly over his ground, with many 
stops and with all sorts of detours. One never 
can foreknow what odd and interestinsf thinsfs 
may be discovered tucked away in unfre- 
quented nooks. I have experienced many 
pleasing surprises in the way of valuable 
information drawn from most unpromising 
sources. Such rich dialect phrases, too, and 
such rare, quaint traits of character, disclose 
themselves ! How marvellously weatherwise 
some of the country folk are, and what keen 
observers of nature ! On the other hand, they 



48 B V- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

have such queer " notions " about signs and 
omens. For instance, the well-known guttural 
croaking of the yellow-billed cuckoo is, in the 
West and South generally believed to presage 
rain ; hence the bird is known amongst the 
rural people by the name of rain-crow. 

I remember with what solemn earnestness 
an old man once heaped maledictions on a 
cuckoo. It was in the midst of a distressing 
drought, and the bird was mournfully uttering 
its notes in an orchard. "There's thet air 
dad-blasted rain crow a-bellerin' down ther' 
ag'in" he cried, savagely wagging his head. 
" Ef I hed a gun I'd blow it inter thunder 'n' 
gone. Ever'thin' a-burnin' up an' the crick a- 
goin' dry an' thet air lyin' rain-crow jest 
a-yowkin' an' yowkin', es ef a flood wer' a- 
comin' in less an' fifteen minutes — blast its 
pictur' ! " 

Speaking of the yellow-billed cuckoo, it is 
one of the most interesting of our American 
birds, — a late comer to our Northern woods, 
where about the middle of May it begins a 
shy, shadowy pilgrimage from tree to tree, 
peering furtively among the tufts of young 
leaves, as if bent on some errand of mystery. 
It is a slender, graceful figure, with a dispro- 
portionately long tail and a slim, slightly curved 
bill, which is almost black above and yellow 
below ; its back is drab ; its under parts a pure 
silvery-white, and its tail dark, tipped with 
snow-white. You may know it by its peculiar 
zigzag flight, and by its cry, ^'' Kaow, Kaow,^^ 
etc., repeated slowly at first, then increasing in 
rapidity to a rattling or pounding croak, and 
finally ending laggingly as it began. It has all 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 49 

the most interesting habits of the English 
cuckoo. 

I am aware that naturalists have stoutly 
claimed that our yellow-bill never lays its eggs 
in other birds' nests , but I have the evidence 
of my own eyes to the contrary. I was plying 
a country lad with questions touching the birds 
and nests of his neighborhood, when he in- 
formed me that a robin and a rain-crow had a 
nest " in cahoot " * in an apple-tree just across 
a lane from where we stood. Of course I was 
anxious to see that nest at once. It was built 
in the usual robin fashion, stacked up in a low 
crotch of the tree, and contained three robin 
eggs and one cuckoo ^gg. This was a num- 
ber of years ago ; but so late as the spring of 
1883 I found a cuckoo's ^gg in the nest of a 
blue-jay. In the mountain region of North 
Georgia, where the yellow-bill nests among the 
haw thickets, I have seen it carrying its ^gg in 
its mouth, no doubt with the purpose of deposit- 
ing it in the care of some other bird. Wher- 
ever I have gone I have heard this cuckoo 
charged w^ith eating the eggs of other birds ; 
but I believe the charge has no better founda- 
tion than the mistake of observers, who, seeing 
it with its own ^gg in its mouth, naturally sup- 
pose that it has been robbing some neighbor- 
bird's nest. My opinion is, that by the time 
our country shall have reached the age of the 
England of to-day our cuckoos will have be- 
come confirmed in all the habits of the Euro- 
pean species. At best the bird is very indif- 
ferent to nest-building, and its natural bent is 
towards entirely evading the reponsibility. 

* " In cahoot " is a common Western and Southern 
phrase for in partnership. 
4 



50 ~B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

Its architectural powers are of the poorest. 
No other of our arboreal birds, not even the 
common dove, builds so crazy and insecure a 
home. But I am getting into rather deep or- 
nithological mire. It is so easy to find room 
for digression when one gets out-of-doors ! 
Everything is suggestive. To the vision of a 
careful observer and student each object in na- 
ture has an interrogation-point beside it. With 
pencil and note-book let us catalogue these 
suggestions and interrogations, and lay them 
aside for future use. When, some day, we 
come to look them over we shall be surprised 
how perfectly — like dried roots and plants — 
they have kept their out-door fragrance and 
taste. 

II. 

In studying the birds most usually met with 
on out-door excursions I have found it very in- 
teresting to make notes of certain striking evi- 
dences of a special harmonic relation between 
their movements, colors, and attitudes, and 
the peculiarities of their natural surroundings. 

Ornithologists have over and over again 
rung the changes on the ease with which the 
quail, the grouse, and the hare make them- 
selves next to invisible to the human eye, and 
to the piercing vision of birds of prey as well ; 
but there are many curious details connected 
with this subject of a natural harmony of mo- 
tion and color, regarding birds and their envi- 
ronments, which I have never seen in print. 
Of course, since the quail, the hare, and the 
grouse have been for so long the objects of 
desire of sportsmen, pot-hunters, and epicures, 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 51 

as well as of careful study by naturalists, their 
peculiarities have all been catalogued, and 
every intelligent person knows that a hare, by 
crouching flat on a dry gray spot of earth, so 
blends with its surroundings as to become 
almost undistinguishable, and that a quail, sit- 
ting in a handful of dry brown leaves is as 
effectually hidden as if buried. So a grouse 
among the tangled twigs of a bare winter tree 
is a very difficult object to discover. A mead- 
ow-lark, in a sunny clover-field, melts, so to 
speak, into the general confusion of brown, 
green, and gold, so that it becomes indeed a 
" sightless song." The humming-bird makes 
its nest of lichen, and places it in a tuft of the 
same on some wrinkled bough, usually at or 
near a crotch ; and the little bird, while on the 
nest, is so in harmony with its surroundings 
that none but the keenest eye would distin- 
guish her from one of the little ruffled knots 
on the bark beside her. The whippoorwill 
builds no nest. Its eggs are deposited on the 
ground at a place where the bird's colors and 
those of her eggs perfectly harmonize with the 
general tone of their surroundings. I have 
known this bird to roll her eggs from spot to 
spot while incubating, evidently for the pur- 
pose of keeping them and herself within a 
proper entourage, this being her only means of 
protection from hawks, owls, and other ene- 
mies. The common dove places its shallow, 
ill-made nest in what appear to be the most 
exposed places, but the bluish ash-gray color 
of the bird's plumage runs so evenly into the 
tone of its surroundings that one might look 
in vain for any sign of a living thing in the 



52 B V- IVA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

midst of that apparently flat wash of drab neu- 
tral. 

That hawks -and owls have powerful and 
far-seeing eyes cannot be doubted ; but they 
either lack a fine power of discrimination in 
vision, or this adaptation of the colors and 
markings of birds to their surroundings is 
very effectual, else these birds of prey exhibit 
a wonderful forbearance toward their natural 
victims during the season of incubation. I 
am inclined to the opinion that hawks are 
what might be called "far-sighted," and that 
their vision at very short distances is not very 
clear. I once saw a goshawk pursuing a 
downy woodpecker, when the latter darted 
through a tuft of foliage and flattened itself 
close upon the body of a thick oak bough, 
where it remained as motionless as the bark 
itself. The hawk alighted on the same bough 
within two feet of its intended victim, and re- 
mained sitting there for some minutes, evi- 
dently looking in vain for it, with nothing but 
thin air between monster and morsel. The 
woodpecker was stretched longitudinally on 
the bough, its tail and beak close to the bark, 
its black and white speckled feathers looking 
like a continuation of the wrinkles and lichen. 
No doubt those were moments of awful sus- 
pense for the little fellow ; but its ruse suc- 
ceeded, and the hawk flew away to try some 
other tidbit. If the woodpecker had stopped 
amongst the green leaves, the hawk would 
have discovered it instantly. 

I have noticed that the cardinal-grosbeak and 
the blue-jay are more often killed by hawks 
than are the other common birds of our woods ; 
and I attribute the fact to their brilliant plu- 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS 53 

mage. The blue-jays are aware of their dan- 
ger, and resort to mob-law whenever a hawk or 
owl is discovered. I have seen a hundred 
blue-jays bonded together and worrying one 
little screech-owl. The grosbeaks protect 
themselves as best they can by keeping well 
within thickets and thorny close-topped trees. 

Along our rivers and brooks live a great 
many aquatic and semi-aquatic birds, whose 
traits and peculiar characteristics seem not to 
have been very closely noted by our natural- 
ists. 

I have mentioned the motions and attitudes 
of birds as partaking of the general tone of 
their surroundings. This is particularly ob- 
servable in the herons, sand-pipers, plovers, 
bitterns, and many shore birds. The motion- 
less, dreamy appearance of the heron as it 
stands in the edge of a still gray pool of water 
is in perfect keeping with all the features and ac- 
cessories of a tarn. So the wavering, tilting 
motion of the little sand-pipers accords harmo- 
niously with the rippling surface of running 
water. So accentuated is this light see-saw 
movement of one of the lesser sand-pipers, 
that the bird is called "teeter-snipe" by the coun- 
try folk. The kill-deer plover, common in our 
damp meadows and fallow lands, has a way of 
running in the low grass and stubble that ren- 
ders it very hard to follow with the eye, and, 
when it stops, its outlines are so shadowy and 
so intimately blent with the gray-brown back- 
ground that one has to look sharply to dis- 
cover it. The little green heron of our brooks 
and rivulets has a habit of sitting on old heaps 
of drift-wood, where he looks for all the world 
like an upright stick or piece of bark. When 



54 B Y- IVA YS A ND BIRD -NO TES. 

standing in the water his colors shade off into 
the greenish wash of the stream, and you rarely 
see him, no matter how near him you may be, 
before he springs into the air, and is away. I 
once shot a fine specimen as it flew past me, 
and it fell among some stones at a brook's 
edge. Something attracted my eyes from the 
spot where it fell, and when I turned again to 
look for my bird I could not see it. I walked 
round and round. I knew it had fallen quite 
dead ; but what had become of it .<* In fact it 
lay there in plain view under my eyes ; but its 
colors were so uniform with those of the 
smooth, water-washed stones, amongst which 
it had fallen, that I was full five minutes dis- 
covering it. Every sportsman has experienced 
similar difBculty in looking for snipe and wood- 
cock after bringing them down. 

The kingfisher's colors are, no doubt, of 
great advantage to him in taking his prey from 
the water. If he were red, instead of being 
dashed over with all the blue and purple and 
silver-gray, and liquid shadows of the brook 
itself, he would not catch many fish. How 
hard it must be for the minnows, as they dis- 
port in the dancing current, to see, through the 
trembling medium, the sky-blue and silvery 
markings of the bird sitting on a swaying 
branch between them and the sky ! And how 
easy it would be for the kingfisher to get all 
the food he might desire if those little fish were 
less of the color of the water in which they 
swim. If quails were scarlet instead of mottled 
brown, how soon the hawks would exterminate 
them ! 

But there is another side to this subject of 
which the poet and artist must take careful 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 



55 



note. Nature's tone is rarely loud, rarely over- 
accentuated. The blue-jay in the orchard, 
the cat-bird in the hedgerow, the kingfisher by 
the brook, each is a key to a harmony. Na- 
ture, on the whole, suggests under-statement 
and a reserve of color. Her contrasts are not 
of the Rembrandt type ; her expressions do 
not abound in adjectives. Gay, flaunting flow- 
ers and gorgeous birds are rare save in green- 
houses and cages. The suppressed power felt 
in the solemn stillness of great woods is sug- 
gestive of that force which some men of few 
words bear about with them. 

I saw a simple picture of Nature's painting 
once, which has returned to my memory again 
and again, and if it could be put on a canvas 
or fastened in a poem it would forever remain 
a masterpiece of art. And yet it was nothing 
but a green heron standing in the swift shallow 
current of a brook with the diamond-bright 
wavelets breaking around its slender legs and 
a tuft of water-grass trembling beside it. I 
was lying idly enough, at full length on the 
brook's bank, so that beyond the bird, a« I 
gazed, opened a fairy-like landscape, over 
which a gentle breeze was blowing with an 
effect wholly indescribable, shaking tall flags 
and tossing the dragon-flies about in the sun- 
shine. The whole effect was cooling and tran- 
quillizing, with a subtle hint in it of a land 
somewhere just out of reach where one might 
dream the lotos-dream forever. 

Now, a good artist might have easily painted 
the little scene so far as painting usually goes ; 
but it would have required such genius as is 
yet to be born to imprison in the sketch the 
hint of what seemed to lie just beyond the 



56 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

dreamy horizon. None but the most master- 
ful genius would have been able to keep up to 
the sweet, quiet key of the coloring, and yet be 
satisfied with the tender, wavering outlines and 
the soft, transparent shadows. The liquid 
tones of sound and color in the brook came so 
harmoniously to my senses, along with the 
motion of swaying flags and bubble-beaded 
waves, that the graceful bird, seen through 
half closed eyes, appeared to be a half-fanciful 
embodiment of the spirit of calm delight, knee- 
deep in some tide of enchantment or romance. 
(Looking back over this last sentence I recog- 
nize its weakness, but must wilfully let it go, 
for it comes very near expressing one phase of 
the view.) Nature is rarely either flamboyant 
or grisdtre, but keeps well the golden mean. 
But, to return to the motions of birds, how 
perfectly in keeping with the broad expanse of 
sky and the movements of the clouds is the 
sailing of the great-winged hawks and vultures ! 
I have watched the swallow-tailed hawks of 
the South sailing so high that they appeared to 
be sliding against the sky. No labored move- 
ments there ; those wings were far above the 
difficulties that beset our earth, and were 
spread on heavenly tides. Even the obscene 
turkey-buzzard, when it has reached a great 
altitude, and is moving so smoothly and 
dreamily between us and the empyrean, be- 
comes an object of respect ; we forget its vul- 
garity, as we do that of men who have mounted 
on the wings of genius, bearing their depravi- 
ties into the rare atmosphere of exalted art. 
The albatross, that prince of the sea-winds, 
seems a part of the fleece-clouds and the sky. 
The flamingoes, the pelicans, the gulls — all 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 57 

the wild sea-fowl and shore-birds have some- 
thing of the ocean-swell and the surf-ripple in 
their flight. I believe it is Dr. Holmes who 
speaks of the 

" Oriole floating like a flake of fire," 

but, true as the comparison is, the oriole, with 
its sunshine and shadows, harmonizes perfectly 
with the fresh greens and yellows of the young 
spring leaves and tassels. How many of our 
fly-catchers, finches, and warblers have a dash 
of sap green and pale leaf-yellow, as if Nature 
had purposely meant them for a part of her 
general spring scheme of color ! Even the 
bull-frog has the same marking as the tuft of 
water-grass in which he sits ready for his head- 
long plunge into the pool. Need I remind the 
experienced sportsman of the fact that a wood- 
duck among the broad leaves and snowy 
blooms of the water-lily is a thing almost im- 
possible to see although in plain view ? The 
beautiful bird's white and gray and purplish 
markings blend easily with the water-gleams, 
and leaf-shimmer, and pure white flower-clus- 
ters. 

The herons and kingfishers have for ages 
set an example that anglers have not had the 
wit to follow. White and pale blue are the 
water high-lights as seen from under the surface 
of the water. A white coat, with misty, dark- 
gray wading-boots, would be nearly the snowy- 
heron's fishing outfit for still, murky water. 
Why t Because the legs must be in the water 
and the coat above water. So the great blue- 
heron has dark gray-brown legs, and all its 
under parts are overlaid with fine narrow 
feathers of silvery white. But the kingfisher, 



58 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD- NO TES, 

whose prey is taken from clear, moving water — 
are peculiarly marked underneath. On his 
breast, next to his white necklace, is a band of 
pale blue, touched here and there with light- 
brown, and below this to his tail he is white. 
Now, a fish looking up through the water has 
the kingfisher between him and the sky. 
Those sky-blue and silver-white feathers cor- 
respond exactly with the water-light and sky- 
light as they are broken up and blended to- 
gether by the tiny chopping waves. When the 
kingfisher makes a harpoon of itself, and, beak 
downward, darts from its perch above the 
water to fall upon a fish, it presents two par- 
allel curved lines, one of which is mainly 
bright blue, the other mostly pure white ; these 
seen through moving water blend into a soft 
mist-gray, perfectly in tone with the prevailing 
tint of most brook-water. 

In connection with observations on the mo- 
tions of birds it is well to recall the fact that 
nearly all the night-birds fly on wings that 
make no sound. An owl slips through the air 
with the utter silence of a shadow. This ac- 
cords with the stillness of the night. It also 
serves the bird a good turn, for the least noise 
would startle his prey at a time when all nature 
is hushed and breathless. I have observed, 
as has every nature-student, I suppose, that 
nearly, if not quite all, the night insects are 
comparatively noiseless in their flight. The 
giant moth does not hum like a bumble-bee or 
a humming-bird. The mosquito is the noisiest 
with his wings of all the night-flyers. But I 
must not get over the line from birds to in- 
sects, while on this subject of harmony, for a 
study of butterflies alone would fill more space 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 59 

than I have for this paper. In tropical and 
semi-tropical countries a curious resemblance 
in color and shape exists between the butter- 
flies and the flowers they haunt, a resemblance 
quite noticeable as far north as the fortieth 
degree of latitude. 

in. 

How would " Tricycles and Triolets " do for 
an alliterative heading to a light chapter on 
out-door poetry ? Ever since I began to taste 
Virgil in my school-days I have had a special 
liking for verse smacking of the woods and 
fields, the birds, the sunshine, and the brooks. 
A certain passage in the ^neid comes into my 
mind now, a strong sketch of a grove of trees, 
with the light playing through the swaying 
foliage with that strangely brilliant effect so 
often observed on bright days in spring and 
summer : — 

— " Turn silvis scena coruscis 
Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra." 

I do not think that William Morris has quite 
done justice to this beautiful Virgilian bit of 
landscape in his rhymed translation. Here is 
his rendering : — 

— " Lo ! the flickering wood above 
And wavering shadow cast adown by darksome hang- 
ing grove." 

" Flickering wood " is not of subtle signifi- 
cance enough to suggest what is somehow con- 
veyed by the original phrase. I have seen the 
sunlight and a breeze playing at once through 
the bright-green top of a tall tree when the 
sudden thrills, so to speak, of golden fire, leap- 



6o BV-PVAVS AND BIRD-NOTES. 

ing among the swaying foliage, were like 
flashes of rare thought shot swiftly through 
the brain of some grand genius. 

Although I have hinted at the triolet, I shall 
not speak of that, or indeed of any other 
purely conventional form of verse, saving the 
mere observation that nothing of the kind, 
from the sonnet to the rondel, is suited to the 
freshness and freedom of out-door life. The 
over-racy honey of the bumble-bee, little suited 
as it is to the table of the epicure, has such 
flavor as ought to mark the songs of the sylvan 
poet. I am in hopes that in our country a 
school of young singers will soon appear, 
widely different from that now forming in Eng- 
land, and also unlike the jeime ecole of France. 
Why should we as a people foster, or even 
countenance, forms of poetical affectation 
worn out and flung aside by the Old World 
some hundreds of years ago ? 

Our venerable Walt Whitman may have 
pushed at times too far in the other direction, 
but he has caught the spirit of freedom and 
has dashed his unkempt songs with a dew as 
American as that of Helicon was Greek. It is 
a broad, out-door sense in which one enjoys 
some of his breezy v^erses : — 

" I think I have blown with you, O winds ; 
O waters, I have fingered every shore with you." 

It is indeed a pleasing thing to idly blow 
with the wind, or to blow with the wind for a 
purpose ; and what is more recreating than to 
finger sweet shores with the water ? A canoe, 
if but a pirogue, and a shore to finger, if only 
the bank of a rivulet, can give delight of no 
uncertain sort to a healthv soul. 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 6i 

A Western poet, Ben Parker, has embodied 
in a simple stanza a good idea of that freshness 
which lingers in the memory after one has been 
driven by the pressure of worldly cares out of 
the redolent ways of nature : — 

" O morning when the days are long, 

And youth and innocence are wed, 
And every grove is full of song, 

And every pathway void of dread ; 
Who rightly sings its rightful praise, 

Or rightly dreams it o'er again, 
When cold and narrow are the days, 

And shrunken all the hopes of men — 
He shall re-waken with his song 
The morning when the days were long." 

The old English poet. Sir Richard Fanshawe, 
took a gloomier view : — 

" Let us use it while we may 
Snatch those joys that haste away I 
Earth her winter coat may cast 
And renew her beauty past : 
But, our winter come in vain, 
We solicit spring again ; 
And when our furrows snow shall cover 
Love may return, but never lover." 

There was a philosopher for you ; but here 
comes one of our young American poets with 
a fancy that finds pretty and apt comparisons 
wherever it skips. Sings Edgar Fawcett : — 

" If trees are Nature's thoughts or dreams. 
And witness how her great heart yearns, 
Then she has only shown, it seems, 
Her lightest fantasies in ferns." 

It is quite surprising, when one comes to 
look, how chary our later poets are of using 
the dew for dampening their materials ; they 
seem to prefer lamp-oil. It may be, after all, 



62 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

that lamp-oil is the better medium, but just 
now I am writing from the saddle of a tricycle 
with the spell of all out-doors upon me. 

How precious is the pleasure now-a-days of 
coming upon a really good stanza of verse, one 
that breaks ©pen, so to speak, like a fragrant 
bud, and distils into one's mind the quintes- 
sence of genuine originality ! I do not speak 
of such originality as Poe's or Baudelaire's or 
Rossetti's, but such as Swinburne has shown 
in a choice few of his simpler lyrics, where he 
has forgotten himself; for Swinburne is a 
master when French and Greek influences do 
not master him. His music is haunting, and 
there are, scattered through his poems, pic- 
tures sketched from nature with a hand as free 
and firm as Shakespeare's : — 

" Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, 
Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea." 

It is not hard to find good out-door poetry if 
we go back to the beginning of English verse. 
Chaucer, with the language fresh in his hands, 
so to speak, coined his phrases with a pen 
dipped in dew. See how he begins his pro- 
logue : — 

" When that Aprille with his schowres swoote 

The drought of Marche hath perced to the roote, 
And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 
Of which vertue engendred is the flour." 

From Chaucer's day down to this no poet, 
save Chaucer himself, has written four lines so 
full of the subtle flavor of Spring as these. I 
must add another stanza : — 

" And the river that I sat upon, 
It made such a noise as it ron, 



TA NGLE-L EA F PA PERS. 63 

Accordant with the birdes armony, 

Methought it was the best melody 
That might ben yheard of any mon." 

Indeed, Chaucer is one of the few poets who 
are good companions in the open air. It is 
like a luncheon of fruit and nuts and choice 
old wine — reading the " Canterbury Tales " 
under a plane-tree by the brookside. 

" And he himself as swete as is the roote 
Of lokorys, or eny cetewale." 

— " Sweete as bragat is or meth, 
Or hoord of apples layd in hay or heth." 

" The hoote somer had maad his hew al brown, 
And certainly he was a good felawe." 

Chaucer saw nature with frank, wide-open 
eyes, albeit he never forgot to be a scholar, 
as the times went. 

" And in a launde, upon a hill of floures, 
Was set this noble goddesse Nature, 
Of branches were her halles and her boures, 
Ywrought, after her craft and her mesure." 

" To do Nature honour and pleasaunce " was 
so good, in the eyes of the old poet, that he 
did not nicely weigh the manner of the doing, 
viewed from the stand-point of our latter-day 
versifiers, but he let in the crispness of morn- 
ing and the pungency of spring buds in lieu 
of these refinements of versification, now so 
highly prized. His knightly spirit and his 
courtly instincts could not repress his abound- 
ing love for the singing-birds, the breezy fields, 
and the wayside brooks. He was artist 
enough to know the value of words and the 
suggestive force of the more elusive elements 
of nature : — 

" Verse, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying," 



64 B V- fVA VS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

as Coleridge expresses it, was Chaucer's verse 
in a large degree. His was 2, paradis parfume^ 
of a kind quite different from the hot-house 
paradise of our modern poetry, whose odors are 
of rhuile de coco, du muse et dugoiidroii so liked 
by Baudelaire and his admirers. 

Emerson's poems are good to have in one's 
tricycle-pouch. I wish I could say as much for 
those of Matthew Arnold. Nothing can be 
finer than the tonic raw sweetness of some of 
Emerson's verses when read in the solitude of 
the woods ; and no doubt this unstrained 
American honey is too rich (as is the pulp of 
our papaws) for the over-delicate English pal- 
ate. I am afraid that Mr. Arnold would find 
fault even with the flavor of sassafras tea or 
rhubarb pies ! It is one of Emerson's quali- 
ties, sharply observable, that, whatever may be 
his technical short-coming, his thoughts are so 
phrased in his poems as to give them a smack 
of the clean, the home-brewed, the genuine. 
A cup of sweet-apple cider, with its honest bou- 
quet and non-intoxicating effect, is not a whit 
more grateful than some of his wood-notes. 
He had the nerve to preserve the aroma of a 
thought, even at the expense of a false rhyme 
or a halting verse. He left some seeds and 
floating bits of apple-rind in his cider. As we 
slowly imbibe his precious meanings we are 
ready to quote him : — 

" I, drinking this, 
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me ; " 

and we fall into a state of mind that melts 

" Solid nature to a dream." 

Let some flying tourist stop for a moment 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 65 

on a breezy hill-top, as I did lately, and read 
this :— 

" I hung my verses in the wind ; 

Time and tide their faults may find : 
All were winnowed through and through ; 
Five lines lasted sound and true." 

Or this :— 

— " The bell of beetle and of bee 
Knell their melodious memory ; " 

and he will feel a new consciousness of how 
Nature 

" Rounds with rhyme her every rune." 

Scattered all through Emerson's poems are 
thoughts that cut into nature and tap her 
sweetest and most hidden veins. 

It is remarkable that no Southern poet has 
arisen to give us the wood-notes of the land of 
the magnolia and the orange. Some of Syd- 
ney Lanier's verses, it is true, are dashed with 
the fervid colors of the semi-tropic, but he did 
not live to do his best, and his ill-health no 
doubt interfered with his out-door studies. 
His Marsh Hym7is are lofty, fragmentary na- 
ture-songs, and I have no doubt that when his 
poems appear in book-form, as they soon will, 
it will be seen that his death was a sad thing 
for those who like genuine poetry. Still the 
fact remains that we have no poet who gives 
us the warm, odorous, fruitful South in rhythm 
and rhyme slumbrous as her sunshine and 
electrifying as her breezes. Indeed, no poet, 
of whatever country, has ever found the way 
to an expression of tropical out-door life. Of 
course I do not speak of mere descriptive 
verse, which is the lowest order of poetry. A 
5 



66 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

Southern Emerson would not be content with 
mere adjectives of color and form ; he would 
go about like a bumble-bee, extracting from 
nature such sweets as might be found racy of 
the soil. He would be a mole among the 
juicy roots of plants, a butterfly among the 
flowers. He would cut into the sap-veins of 
the trees ; he would peel the fragrant barks. 
His poems would not be composed of these 
things, nor principally of them, but their flavor 
would come out of them, and out of the sun- 
shine and the lazy summer winds. 

Who knows but that the invention of the 
wheel, this charming instrument of self-propul- 
sion, is to work a new element into our litera- 
ture — not merely the wheel element, but the 
provincial element — an element which seems 
to have almost disappeared from the poetry 
and fiction made in the great literary centres 
of New York, London and Paris. I have felt, 
while enjoying short leisurely tours on the tri- 
cycle, that all the bright young cyclists of our 
country are certainly in the best way of gath- 
ering that knowledge which fully complements 
the lore of the books. Surely it is given to 
him who knows Nature and loves her, to 
speak : 

" As if by secret sight he knew 
"Where, in far fields, the orchis grew." 



IV. 



Here are my notes of a short tricycle run 
made on the second of May, 1884. The trip 
was far more pleasing to me, no doubt, than 
I can make it appear to others, but the notes 
may serve to show how much can be seen, 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 67 

heard, and felt in a little while under the 
ordinary circumstances of a run ; or rather 
what a mass of observations one can record . 
by the industrious use of one's eyes, ears, and 
note-book, and pencil, even when nothing 
really unusual occurs. 

I set out quite early in the morning over 
a good road. A slight rain had fallen the 
day before, and there were a few puddles here 
and there, but no real mud. The spring had 
been a little slow coming, though the wheat- 
fields were waving ankle-high with a rich 
sward, and the woods were washed over with 
the tender green* of tassels and leaves. A 
bracing freshness pervaded the air, which was 
from the south — a mere breath with a hint of 
summer warmth in it. No sooner had I 
cleared the town and got rid of the half-dozen 
ragged urchins that ran howling after me, as 
if I might have been mistaken for the advance 
agent of a circus, than I put on a spurt of 
power, bowling along in a level lane, with a 
hedge of bois d'arc on one hand and a high 
board fence on the other. A man walking in 
the middle of the road ahead of me evidently 
did not hear me coming, for when I whisked 
past him he shied like a young colt and 
glared at me as if he meant to attack me, but 
I left him so suddenly that I could not analyze 
his expression further. Somehow this little 
incident called up De Quincey's Vision of 
Sudden Death— 2, story which has always 
seemed to me a most perfect piece of art-work. 
If you have not read it, I advise you to take 
it with you on your first outing. It will 
fill an hour of re.st with an enjoyment wholly 



68 BY-WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

new. You will understand how it was recalled 
by the trifling incident above recorded. 

' My way lay due east for nearly a mile, with 
the meadow-larks whistling in the fields on my 
right, and the woodpeckers chattering on the 
fence-posts to the left. The woodpeckers 
(those fellows half white and half black and 
hooded in scarlet) had just arrived from the 
South, and appeared overjoyed with their sur- 
roundings. They looked very clean in their 
shining jet coats and snow under-garments. 
A toll-gate stood at the end of the lane. I 
whirled noiselessly through it before the wo- 
man who kept it could decide whether my 
vehicle was down on her list, and ran over a 
little hill just as the sun cleared the tree-tops 
in the east. A small boy was riding a big- 
wheeled plough, to which three fme sleek 
horses were working abreast. The musty 
odor of the fresh-turned soil was very pleasant. 
Blue-birds were dropping into the new furrow 
behind the plough to get the larvae of various 
insects exposed there. Two sparrow-hawks 
were wheeling in small circles, some fifty feet 
high, watching for field-mice, or possibly intent 
on taking one of the blue-birds unaware. 
There was a worm-fence on one side of the 
road and the corners were literally carpeted 
with wild blue-violets. What a pity it is that 
these beautiful flowers have no perfume ! The 
lack seems to take a great deal from their 
value when one discovers it. It is almost like 
finding that a very musical song has no mean- 
ing in its sonorous phrases. I now had some 
stiff work going up a hill on a curve, and then 
came a smooth bit of coasting, followed by a 
short stretch through level heavy sand ; then 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 69 

across a brook on an iron bridge and into a 
grove of buckeye trees heavy with young leaves 
and ckistered blooms, about which the wild 
bees were booming merrily enough. 

Here I stopped, and sitting in the saddle, 
sketched in the rough outlines of a boy who 
was trying to snare sucker-fish, in a clear eddy 
of the brook, with a looped wire. The first 
Baltimore oriole of the season was singing 
overhead in its peculiar, monotonous way. 
This bird's song always seems spiral to me, as 
if it had got a twist in coming forth. On the 
anchor-posts of an old water-gate, I saw some 
of the finest lichens I have ever met with ; 
great round rosettes, puffed and ruffled, show- 
ing many delicate shades of sap-green, celadon 
and gray. Not far from here I found a hill 
too steep for comfortable riding, and after 
pushing my machine up it, I was glad to see 
before me a long stretch of level road through 
beautiful farms. An apple orchard, too 
closely set, was beginning to bloom, and a long 
row of cherry-trees was white as a windrow of 
snow. What is more expressive of comforta- 
ble, worthy wealth and liberal security from the 
failures of life than a broad, well-kept Western 
farm ? Here were fields of wheat, so wide that 
they looked almost like prairies, side by side 
with meadow-lands on which the clover and 
timothy were thick and green over hundreds 
of acres ; and then the rich black plough-land, 
too, where soon the corn-planting would begin. 
Orchards, garden-plats, grazing lands, cattle, 
swine, sheep, and horses, broad-winged barns, 
windmills for pumping water, and a spacious 
residence embowered in maple trees ; surely it 
is well to be an Indiana farmer. 



70 B Y- IVA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

I bowled along at a good rate with my head 
high, taking in deep draughts of the whole- 
some air ; a long row of beehives in a garden, 
with the busy workers stirring on their little 
porches, sweetened the scene with a thought 
of big white honey-combs and snowy muffins. 
A fair, yellow-haired child was standing on 
a stile as I ran past the house, and she looked 
at me with great surprised blue eyes, holding 
meantime her little sun-bonnet in her hands. 
A big brown dog left her side and ran bark- 
ing after me in a good-natured way for some 
distance, then turned and leisurely trotted 
back. A little farther on I stopped to watch 
a pair of cat-birds in a bit of hedge. They 
seemed to be looking for a good place in which 
to build their nest, for the female had a slender 
wisp of dry grass in her mouth. Up and 
down and in and out they went, all the time 
uttering their peculiar mewing cry. Finally 
the male mounted to the highest branch of the 
hedge and poured forth a sweet, trickling 
medley, not unlike the night-song of the South- 
ern mocking-bird, though of far slenderer vol- 
ume and inferior timbre. Why is it that the 
country folk have a contempt for the cat-bird ? 
I have found this beautiful little songster under 
a ban from Michigan to Florida, with no one 
to say a good word for it, and yet, the mock- 
ing-bird and brown-thrush excepted, it has 
no rival in America as a singer. 

Driving on again my road soon began to 
descend, growing steeper and steeper, until at 
length I put my feet on the rest, and, with 
hand on the brake, coasted at dizzying speed 
round a long curve down into a dense wood 
of mnple, walnut, and plane trees that bor- 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 71 

dered a little river. At the foot of the hill I 
met a man driving a team of six- horses hitched 
to a wagon whereon was a saw-log sixteen 
feet long and nearly four feet in diameter. 
The log was tulip, usually called poplar in the 
West, the Liriodendron lidipifera of the bota- 
nists, and appeared not to have a blemish of 
any sort in it. What a grand tree it must have 
been when standing, and for how many Junes 
it had bloomed in the woods, its huge flowers 
flaming among its rich green leaves. 

For some distance my road now skirted 
the foot of a bluff along the bank of the river. 
At one point I stopped for awhile to watch 
a fisherman casting for bass. He was in a 
little skiff near the middle of the river and 
was casting down stream with a minnow for 
bait. He appeared to understand his busi- 
ness, but I got tired, and drove on before he 
caught anything ; still I carried away with me 
a pleasing impression,— in my memory a pict- 
ure of the silver current breaking around the 
skiff and the tall graceful angler patiently ply- 
ing his rod and reel. What fascinating uncer- 
tainty there is in angling ! What a big fish 
one is always just on the point of catching ! 
As I write I have in my ears the murmur of 
every brook from Canada to the chestnut-cov- 
ered hills of North Georgia. 

Turning aside from the main road I pushed 
my tricycle up a steep, stony hill and mount- 
ing, soon found myself following the mean- 
derings of a narrow cart-way, overshadowed by 
wide-branching beech trees just beginning 
to show their leaves. A half-mile of slow 
riding brought me to a thicket of wild plum 
bushes loaded with their fragrant white 



72 BY-WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

blooms, amongst which bees and other insects 
were glancing and humming, and a number of 
small yellow green fly-catchers were actively 
engaged in a restless pursuit of their proper 
food. I gathered a big bunch of these odorous 
plum-sprays and bound it fast to the handle of 
my brake lever so that I could have with me 
in my further journeying the fruity breath of 
the wild orchard. 

Running down a long rut-furrowed slope, and 
then over a damp flat in a cool, shady hollow, I 
came to a nasty little stream sweeping through 
a narrow bog. Here I called a halt for con- 
sultation. That mud looked deep and treacher- 
ous. I saw where a wagon had been pried 
out of it with fence rails. There was nothing 
to do but get across, however, so I fell to 
work, carrying pieces of logs, rails, fallen 
boughs, etc., until I had made a quite respect- 
able corduroy bridge, over which I pushed my 
machine with perfect safety ; then I had to 
lift it over a large log that had fallen across 
the road. In fact I did not mount again for a 
quarter of a mile, at the end of which I found 
myself at the source of the road, where it ap- 
peared that I was caught fast between a huge 
old red barn and a weather-beaten but com- 
fortable looking farm-house. 

A brawny, grizzled man with a hammer and 
monkey-wrench was tinkering with a disabled 
plough. I approached him cap in hand, and 
mopping the perspiration from my face. He 
immediately showed a deep but quasi-con- 
temptuous interest in the mechanism of the 
tricycle. I plied him with questions as to his 
crop-prospects, and was soon on easy terms 
with him. I got a drink out of a sweet old 



TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 73 

gourd at his well, and obtained permission to 
ride across his wide pasture land to a road a 
half-mile distant. I mounted in his barnyard, 
and, while he held open a big gate for me, 
dashed out at my best speed into the level 
grass-field, where the dandelions shone like 
stars. A herd of steers, as I approached them, 
eyed me wildly for awhile, then ran away at a 
thundering pace, with their tails whirling and 
their heads high in air. I had to push across 
thirty acres of fresh ploughed land (a very unin- 
teresting and tiresome operation) before I 
reached the road. Now came a long spin over 
a surface just damp enough to be elastic, and 
although the road-bed had been gravelled it was 
quite free from ugly stones. The air had 
freshened and was blowing in sweet gusts 
from the south. 

The sunshine was growing in power ; one 
could almost hear the buds exploding. A 
clover-field beside the road was a lovely 
sight, though not yet in bloom. Its dark green 
tufts looked as if they had gushed out of the 
earth in a moment of ecstatic impulse. In- 
deed, some occult force made itself manifest 
in every bud and blade, and stalk and leaflet, 
from which one could not fail to catch a fine 
mental tonic. I passed a level reach of maple 
wood in which grew scattered patches of man- 
drake that looked like the grass-green tents of 
lilliputian armies. In places the ground was 
rosy white with the blooms of the claytonia, 
or yellow with the stars of the adder-tongue. 

What sweet and sure alchemic recipes 
Mother Earth gives us, if we could but read 
them ! How unfailing are her schemes for 
the perpetuation of life, freshness, strength. 



74 BV-IVAVS AND B IRD-NO TES. 

beauty ? These flowers are but the bubbles 
thrown up from her inexhaustible veins of vital 
force. Is not this woodsy fragrance which 
loads the air of spring mere surplus steam 
from Nature's alembics ? and in breathing it do 
we not take into our blood a trace of her elixir ? 
One's imagination renews itself by absorbing 
and assimilating the precious exhalations from 
the countless valves of woods and fields. How 
evenly and perfectly our book-lore blends and 
shades into what we gather from nature ! 

" Spirit of lake, and sea, and river — 
Bear only perfumes and the scent 
Of healthy herbs to just men's fields." 

All herbs and plants are healthy and whole- 
some, too, in their way. I saw a flicker eat 
the berries of the dreadful night-shade — not 
on this tour, for the plant comes later — and I 
have known a quail to swallow the seeds of 
the Jamestown weed with no bad result. But 
to my tricycling. 

I soon came to where a broad road, leading 
homeward, crossed mine at nearly right-angles, 
and I set my face towards town with a three- 
mile run before me, over a fine rolling way be- 
tween incomparably fertile farms. A fox- 
squirrel ran ahead of me on a fence until I 
came so near him that he sailed off into a 
field of wheat, and went bounding through the 
waving green blades to a lone walnut tree, up 
which he darted and disappeared in a hole. 

The spires of our little city came in sight, 
gleaming above the maple trees that border 
the streets. I bumped across the railway 
track, whirled over a long hill, and descended 
into the suburbs with my blood tingling, and 
my memory full of fresh sights and sounds. 
At nine o'clock sharp I was at my desk. 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 

" Silva alta Jovis, luciisve DiiDicv^ 

How shall we account for the old mytholo- 
gies, or shall we attempt to account for them 
at all ? That beauty is imperishable, and that 
whatever fills the measure of logic may be 
taken as demonstrated, has somehow come to be 
accepted by wise men as true. But shall we 
receive or reject the gods of the ancients on 
the score of beauty on the one hand or of logic 
on the other? Who ever did believe in the 
gods t Were they men of feeble minds or 
debilitated physiques — a lot of degenerate 
clods without any fixedness of character.? 
Was Agamemnon a fool. Homer a dunce, 
Pythagoras a ninny, or Caesar a weakling ? 

These may at first view seem questions both 
trite and uninteresting ; but I purpose sketch- 
ing presently, as best I may, the outlines of a 
quiet little adventure which led me to ponder 
deeply over the proposition, Was there ever 
any foundation in fact for this belief in the 
gods ? I will not say that I believe there ever 
was, nor can I own to a total disregard for 
certain rather obscure and mysterious evi- 
dences in nature of the existence of beings 
whose tenure of material bodies is as certain 
and indestructible as the bodies are shadowy, 
and whose power is somehow held, for some 
reason hard to discover, in abeyance. If 
gods ever were they now are. They may not 
be now palpable or visible or audible, but 



76 BV-JVAVS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

they are not dead or banished. For our pres- 
ent purpose let us admit that time was when 
nature, the great generator of mysteries, dis- 
closed immortal beings to man. Were these 
beings necessarily, because immortal, omnipo- 
tent or superhuman in their powers ? I 
should say they probably were possessed of 
more than human potency in certain ways. 
Immortality, even when robbed of everything 
but the death-resisting principle, is in some 
way very nearly married to invisibility in our 
idea of it. The power of rendering itself in- 
visible to human eyes, that is, the ability to 
make itself a nonentity to all appearances, is 
an attribute of every imaginable god, or at 
least of every god at all like those of the Greek 
and Latin mythologies. 

Now suppose certain beings, born of a mys- 
terious play of nature, possessed of these two 
things, immortality and the power of rendering 
themselves invisible, and what more is needed 
as a basis upon which to build the fabric of 
heathen polytheism "i Why not, then, take the 
so-called gods to have been a race of such 
immortals, without any other attributes of the 
true llieos in them ? If such they were, how 
natural for human imagination, operated upon 
by the subtle influences of awe and wonder, to 
add the rest. Indeed it seems to me hardly 
fair, this laughing to scorn the beautiful theol- 
ogy of the ancients without so much as giving 
it the benefit of a charitable doubt, and with- 
out even admitting that it may have rested on 
a venial mistake arising out of some manifes- 
tations of nature now withdrawn or in abey- 
ance. But the gods may have been immaterial, 
in the common sense, and yet not immortal in 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 77 

the best meaning of the word. Certain condi- 
tions of mundane things might have been 
necessary to their existence here. If we 
should study nature closely for the purpose we 
might discover those conditions. 

And this fetches from its hiding-place my 
theory. It may be called the grove theory. 
No one can think of the gods as separable 
from the woods and waters. The ancients ad- 
mitted this. They went further, dedicating to 
each deity its grove or stream. It seems to 
me that this meant more than mere empty 
complimentary dedication. It was a recogni- 
tion and acknowledgment of the conditions 
upon which the gods would remain with them. 
In short, unsmitten, unshorn, pristine nature 
could accommodate these mysterious beings, 
and it only. The groves grown of virgin soil, 
the uncultivated flowers and fruits, the balm 
and spice of perfect trees — these prepared the 
air for the gods to breathe. Something, we 
may not know what — the keen pure essence 
of unchanged nature from some source now 
practically dried up, may be — fed them and 
kept them within the bounds of visibility. The 
dryads disappeared perforce, it may well be 
assumed, when their woods were desecrated, 
and the naiads when their fountains were pol- 
luted. The fauns faded into shadows and 
were blown away when the axe and saw had 
felled the groves and fragrant thickets. The 
satyr withdrew into the deepest recesses of the 
forests as man advanced, and Apollo and 
Diana fled away — whither ? 

Possibly some secret potency existed in the 
air that flowed through those virgin woods 
and over those unpolluted streams which could 



7S B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

give to all those immortals the power of ren- 
dering themselves visible, and when it was 
exhausted by man's encroachments they fell 
away into invisibility. And if some hidden 
cave in the world could now be found where 
nature h^s never been disturbed by even the 
simplest art, may be there might be discovered 
one or two happy deities revelling in the mer- 
est pool, so to speak, of what was once the 
great ocean of their " peculiar element." If 
this theory is true the gods are invisible, not 
dead, and they are invisible not from their 
own choice, but because their " peculiar ele- 
ment " is exhausted which, while it lasted, 
made visibility possible. 

I have no certain recollection of having 
been poring over this or any similar train of 
semi-reasoning, nor have I the faintest knowl- 
edge of what I was thinking of, when my 
guide, halting suddenly and knocking the 
ashes from his pipe into the hollow of his 
great brown hand, said, " Well, here we are." 
At the sound of his rather gentle though deep 
and sonorous voice, I looked around, feeling 
as if I had been aroused from a dreamful slum- 
ber, without power to recall any definite idea 
of my dreams. 

Every one has experienced this feeling when 
straying in an idle, musing way through some 
still grove or quiet meadow. Suddenl}', as if 
by a spell of enchantment everything looks 
strange. Even the sunlight is unlike itself. 
The sough of the wind is peculiarly impressive. 
Even the color of the grass is changed. 
You rub your eyes ; but it is some time before 
you see, hear and feel natural. 

So with me just then. I was well aware, to be 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 79 

sure, that starting from the guide's cabin we 
had walked over a high ridge, almost a moun- 
tain, following for our way a zigzag path or 
trail that led us back and forth among vast 
fragments of variegated granite under wide- 
spreading boughs of low cedar trees. Now, 
however, we stood on the bank of a little river 
whose water crept past us in a slow but re- 
markably limpid tide as clear as glass, into 
which I gazed with an indistinct vision, and 
feeling a vague sense of the strangeness of 
everything about me. A pirogue lay moored 
at our feet. The guide motioned me to get in. 
I obeyed at once, but had time in so doing to 
note how old and frail, indeed how rotten the 
boat appeared to be. The guide accidentally 
tossed the pipe-ashes from his hand down upon 
one of the gunwales where they seemed natu- 
rally to disappear, mingling with the loose 
mould and minute fungi of the decaying wood. 
In this frail vessel we purposed passing over a 
dangerous rapid of the stream some distance 
below ; for it was the spirit of adventure had 
brought me here. I was in no condition, how- 
ever, to realize the possibilities of the step I 
was about to take. I shook myself, rubbed 
my eyes and strove to get rid of this hazy 
mood ; but succeeded only when the guide by 
a vigorous paddle-stroke sent us straight out 
to the stream's middle. Then I began to feel 
naturally and fell to making a close study of 
the guide and the boat. 

What a taciturn, grimly selfish-looking fel- 
low the man was ! His face was not a bad 
one, however, and his form was ease and 
strength incarnate. You could not guess 
such a man's age. Not a gray hair on his head, 



8o B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

not a wrinkle, denoting years, in his brow or 
cheeks, and yet you suspected he was old. It 
might have been the rather hard glitter of his 
calm, gray eyes, or the half stolid way in which 
he kept closed his immense hirsute lips, which 
suggested something of senility coupled with 
unusual strength. His bodily movements, too, 
though full of elasticity of a certain sort, 
lacked the ready suppleness of youth, suggest- 
ing instead the half-automatic, perfunctory 
agility of long experience. You occasionally 
see such old men by the sea or in the moun- 
tains. They are men whom age cannot con- 
quer — the men of perfect health. But his boat 
was not so impervious to time and exposure, it 
seemed. A kind of dry rot had attacked it, 
apparently years ago. This, however, seemed 
to have added to its buoyancy, for it danced 
upon the water like a bubble or a feather. I 
could not help, as I glanced from man to boat, 
imagining a sort of rapport between them, and 
presently the odd fancy that, like the centaur 
and the horse, they were really one, took hold 
on my mind so forcibly that I could not re- 
strain a low laugh as we began to glide down 
the stream, so ludicrously did the blending of 
the guide's gray, old clothes with the sides and 
bottom of the gray, old boat, in color and text- 
ure, enforce the whimsical thought. 

It may as well be stated here that the stream 
upon which we were now afloat ran past the 
guide's cabin over on the other side of the 
ridge. But to do so it had to make a complete 
double round a great point, after dashing 
through a deep, hidden valley, down stony 
precipices and between the close-drawn walls 
of a resounding gorge. 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 8i 

My seat was forward near the prow of the 
boat, and I could look straight ahead over the 
little, decaying staff which, in imitation of a 
bowsprit, slanted off from the pirogue's beak. 
A glance down the river showed me how near 
to the dizzy escarpments of the mountain its 
current flowed, whilst over against this vast 
wall a wooded country, almost flat, swept off to 
a range of low orreen hills a mile distant. 

The guide propelled our frail craft with a 
short, broad paddle which must have been 
very old, for the wood of which it was made 
had turned green and was curiously creased 
with worm-furrows and slimy with fungus or 
moss. Besides this paddle, a long cane rod, 
for use when the process of polling was ne- 
cessary, lay at hand. But, so sensitive seemed 
our ancient pirogue to even the least impulse, 
there was little need of any engine, more than 
the stream's own current, to propel us withal. 
Noiselessly and evenly we slipped down the 
tide, much like the shadowy figures of a dream, 
it seemed to me, between the fern-braided 
banks. We scarcely made a ripple as we 
went. My habit of close observation soon 
prevailed over the dreamy mood that had set- 
tled upon me, and I began a minute study of 
the shores as they stole, by apparent motion, 
to the rear of us. Below the wild tangles of 
ferns and semi-fluviatic plants beautifully 
waved lines of parachrose stones lay in blend- 
ing strata, as if half-welded by some process 
of fluxion long since ended — a dim polychrome 
rendered doubly effective by our motion. On 
the side opposite to the ridge the bank was 
quite low, giving us free insight to the farthest 
6 



82 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

glooms of the woods, where wild flowers of 
many kinds grew in profusion. 

We had proceeded but a few hundred yards 
when I caught sight of a pretty, dappled fawn 
peering out at us with its great, mellow eyes 
from a clump of green shrubs. I now felt 
deeply vexed with myself for allowing the un- 
reasonable importunities of the guide to cause 
me to leave my trusty rifle behind at his cabin. 
But a moment later, when the lissom, young 
animal against which I was aiming imaginary 
bullets sped aw^y like the very spirit of merri- 
ness, I did not regret the gun. The common 
wild birds of the woods were everywhere. 
Blue jays and yellow finches, fly-catchers, 
nut-hatches and thrushes made a great chirp- 
ing and twittering along with the mingled 
rustlings of their wings. I noted six or seven 
varieties of woodpecker, among them the 
ivory-bill and that great, scarlet-crested, black 
king of the woods named by the naturalists 
Hylotoiniis pikatiis . Water fowls of the 
smaller kinds flew up before us, and occasion- 
ally a blue heron or a small wader of the bit- 
tern kind took wing in its peculiarly stately 
way. 

A belted kingfisher, that most beautiful of 
all our birds of the streams, suddenly appeared 
in the air just in front of me, where he hov- 
ered for a moment as if doubtful whether to 
fly over us and go up the river or to turn 
about and retreat before us. He chose the 
latter. As he did so he uttered that sharp 
little laugh every angler has heard. O beauti- 
ful bird ! your laugh has an evil ring ! O 
halcyon ! there is a great icicle in your heart, 
no matter how fine the weather you bring. 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. Z^ 

By short flights, this bird kept a certain distance 
ahead of us, alighting now on a projecting 
stone of the clifif on one hand, and now on a 
reaching maple bough on the other, eyeing us 
warily as we approached and always laughing 
as it spread its gay pinions to float, rather 
than fly, down the steady little wind which 
drew along with the stream's course. We left 
all the other birds behind us. The herons 
and bitterns, describing the arc of a circle to 
avoid us, invariably turned up the stream in 
their flight, and the little sandpipers and shad- 
owy looking waders of smaller kinds merely 
flitted from side to side of the water. 

Sitting with my back to the guide and 
watching the halcyon's manoeuvres, I began in 
an idle way to generate a fantastic theory con- 
necting its flight with our own by a thread of 
fatalistic destiny. He, the beautiful, happy 
bird, was on the wind current ; we on the 
water-stream. We were in a frail rotten 
canoe ; he on his own splendid wings. How 
delightfully easy for him to evade death or 
even danger, whilst we, despite all exertions to 
the contrary, might soon speed right down to 
destruction ! An underlying stone too near 
the surface could crush our craft into shreds. 
This bird of the hard, metallic laugh might be 
the demon of the stream leading us on to the 
rapids, to shout and scream and jeer when we 
were dashed to pieces in the canon. 

I noted now, by a glance, that our velocity 
was gradually increasing, and that we were 
following the sinuations of a sort of central 
current, which flowed among great bowlders 
and angular fragments of granite. The guide 
used the paddle merely as a rudder, and the 



84 B V- WA VS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

cane, only now and then, to push us away 
from a dangerous breaker. The day, which 
had been a singularly fine one, was now fast 
drawing to its close, the sun having fallen be- 
hind the ridge, and a soft bloom hung directly 
over us — a shadow overtopped by the vast 
reaches of yellow sunshine. Our flight, how- 
ever, would be short and the rapids would 
swallow us, or happily we would swing round 
the mountain's wall and slip down the gentler 
current beyond to the guide's cabin, before the 
coming of twilight, possibly before sunset. 

The guide had described to me, in his 
grimly laconic way, how he had frequently 
passed these rapids for the mere excitement 
of the adventure. I was the first man he had 
ever led into this cove and he was sure that 
no human being, himself excepted, had ever 
before set foot here. This communication 
was sufficient of itself to brace me beyond any 
fear, even if I had been a most nervous man, 
instead of a resolute naturalist used to danger. 
Therefore I looked forward to the catastrophe 
of this little drama with a calm mind and even 
pulse, toying, meanwhile, with the curious 
fancy that the halcyon was luring us on to de- 
struction. 

I was once talking with a great man, whose 
profound knowledge and wise judgment would 
seem to preclude trivial fancies from his mind, 
and was surprised at hearing him tell how 
often, in his moments of solitude, his imagina- 
tion or fancy would fasten upon some insignifi- 
cant thing as ominous or prophetic. A gay 
beetle dancing in. the sunlight before him ; a 
withered leaf blown across his path ; a sud- 
denly discovered violet or flower-de-luce ; the 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 85 

peculiar tone of a bird's voice ; any, even the 
least noteworthy thing, would hint to him of 
the future. He would find himself trying his 
fortune, so to speak, by little tests put in an 
almost involuntary and wholly whimsical way, 
to accidents and circumstances as they would 
come of things as trivial as the mere breaking 
of a twig or blowing away of a flower petal. 
He related, with minute details, how once an 
emerald-green, peculiarly brilliant scarabaeus 
kept itself by short, sudden flights, just ahead 
of him in a woodland path, and how after he 
had followed it some distance, wondering 
what it was leading him to, he came upon a 
huge rattle-snake, coiled ready for a spring. 
The beetle had saved the life of a great states- 
man and a true man ! 

I could not console myself with the fancy 
that the kingfisher would steer us safely 
through the rapids ; for his voice was insincere, 
and his very movements would forcibly suggest 
sinister things. Such is human perversity, 
moreover, that I preferred the evil interpreta- 
tion. I actually found myself gloating over 
the anticipation of the halcyon's successful 
stratagem. I even smiled as I saw, in fancy, 
our boat dissolve into fibres and ourselves go 
whirling through awful vortices mangled and 
dead ! 

Nevertheless, I noted everything we passed, 
and fixed in my memory with the power of a 
trained concentration the changes in the 
landscape bordering the stream. These 
changes were constant, blending into each 
other like colors on the artist's canvas. I im- 
agined that the trees and shrubs and ferns, . 
and the aquatic grasses into which the mar 



86 B Y- WA YS AND BIKD-NO TES. 

ginal ripples of the river leaped with low whis- 
perings, constantly grew brighter and greener 
as we advanced Overhead the sky was 
purely blue and clear, with just a hint of the 
yellow sunlight flung athwart it. In mid-air, 
above the mountain's shadow, there hung a 
misty splendor, such as is often seen on very 
hot days hovering over water. A fragrance, 
which strengthened apace with our motion, 
reached my sense, as if from some gradually 
opened pot pourri of all sweet, spicy things. 
The great, belted kingfisher seemed to feel 
this as he led on, flinging back at us the chat- 
ter of his voice and the rich, silken clash of 
his wings. 

I was now aware of an obscure feeling of 
restless expectancy beginning to infuse itself 
through me. I turned half about to look at 
my guide. He made a frightful grimace at me 
for rocking the boat, and glancing down I saw 
some minute sprays of water bubble over the 
gunwale ! Out through the momentary scowl 
of the guide's face his vast age seemed to leer 
like a wild demon. Those bubbles leaping 
over the boat's rotten side reminded me of 
how easily it might swamp in the rapids. 
With a little twinge of self-rebuke for my 
thoughtlessness, I resumed my former posi- 
tion. 

Within these last few moments of time, 
some change of no doubtful sort, but still a 
change which eludes expression even now, 
had taken place in the general appearance of 
all surrounding things. It may have been an 
atmospheric or chromatic variance, it may 
have been merely the mutations of the evening 
shadows hovering in this low valley ; but, from 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 87 

whatever cause, a something Hke the glamour 
of a dream or of romance had settled down 
upon stream and rocks and trees. An exhila- 
ration like that induced by a salt breeze, more 
refined and subtile, however, took hold on me. 
The motion of the boat was now quite rapid, 
but smooth and noiseless. 

I began to be impressed with the utter, the 
primeval, the unchanged beauty of the land- 
scape. These woods, locked in by awful 
precipices, this stream, full of dangerous falls, 
had never been troubled by hunters or anglers, 
or naturalists or tourists, nor yet by the insa- 
tiable makers of farms. Pristine power and 
perfectness dwelt here as they did aeons ago. 
I looked and saw the smooth, greenish-colored 
bark of the trees, the deep expression of riant 
vitality in the leaves ; I drew into my gratified 
sense the strengthening bouquet of surround- 
ing nature, and then suddenly the inquiry, 
from what source I cannot say, arose in my 
mind, are the gods still here t At first it was 
a half-idle thought, blown across my mental 
field like a rose petal across a garden ; but it 
found a lodgment. I toyed with it and it 
grew. It suited my mood and the mood of 
nature. 

The halcyon flitted on before us, and now, 
far away, like the soft murmur of a breeze, our 
ears caught the pulsating sound of the rapids, 
A deer, bearing young antlers, stood on the 
bank and very steadily eyed us as we passed. 
He did not seem to fear us, his gaze denoting 
only a lively curiosity. Indeed he had no 
cause to fear us, for all thought of the chase 
was far from me, and as for my guide he had 
enough to do caring for the boat. 



88 B V- IVA YS A N'D BIRD- NO TES. 

Are the gods still here ? The question fed 
my fancy. I began, in a half-earnest, half- 
idle way, to scrutinize every dim opening, 
every shadowy recess of the woods, as we sped 
by. I wove a cocoon of the old, silken webs 
of poesy around about me, looking through the 
sheeny film of which I hoped to assist the shy 
deities in taking on visibility. If I could only 
see one god, even though it flitted past me a 
ghostly, diaphanous mockery of its former self, 
what a joy it would be ! 

The wings of our luring halcyon were now 
in almost constant motion, so swift was our 
following, and the sound of the voice of the 
waterfall was deepening and spreading. Some 
little thrills of quietly ecstatic delight began to 
trouble my senses. I have occasionally felt 
the same when sailing before a smart breeze in 
an open boat after a long absence from the 
sea. 

At some distance before us I saw a shining 
line drawn, like a wavering gossamer, across 
the surface of the river. Beyond it a silvery 
mist swayed in the gloom of giant trees that 
partially overshadowed the water. This line 
was the break where the cataract began and 
this mist was the spray from the agitated 
stream in the canon ; but to my mind the 
silvery thread was the index of something 
more, and with a leap, so to speak, my imagi- 
nation reached the threshold of the gods ! The 
line marked the boundary of the haunts of the 
shining ones. Heavy and sweet the odors 
drifted upon us, and in all the trees we heard 
a satin rustle. The cardinal-birds and the 
wood-thrushes suddenly ceased their singing. 
Deeper and deeper we sank into the narrowing 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 89 

dell, sweeter and softer the gloom grew apace. 
I marked well the giant trees just beyond the 
sheeny line, and saw through the spaces be- 
tween them shadowy mysteries flitting to and 
fro — mysteries that a dash of sunlight would 
have dissipated, that a puff of wind would have 
lifted up and scattered like smoke. Faster 
and faster we sped, wilder and wilder grew 
the flight of the halcyon. He could not take 
time now to light at all, but only to hover a 
moment at eligible perching places, and then 
hurry on before us. 

What a thrill is dashed through a moment 
of expectancy, a point of supreme suspense, 
when by some time of preparation the source 
of sensation is ready for a consummation — a 
catastrophe ! At such a time one's soul is 
isolated so perfectly that it feels not the re- 
motest influence from any other of all the uni- 
verse. The moment preceding the old pa- 
triarch's first glimpse of the Promised Land 
— that point of time between uncertainty and 
certainty, between pursuit and capture, where- 
into is crowded all the hopes of a lifetime, as 
when the brave old sailor from Genoa first 
heard the man up in the rigging utter the 
shout of discovery — the moment of awful hope, 
like that when Napoleon watched the charge 
of the Old Guard at Waterloo, is not to be 
described. There is but one such crisis for 
any man. It is the yes or the no of destiny. 
It comes, he lives a life-time in its span ; it 
goes, and he never can pass that point again. 

But there are crises, scarcely less absorb- 
ing, to which, after they are passed, one can 
turn and almost live them over. These are 
the crises into which no element of selfishness. 



90 



B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 



more than the mere modicum contained in the 
anticipation of pleasurable sensations, has 
entered, or crises of the imagination based 
wholly on phantasmal exigencies. I reach 
back the powers of my memory now, and they 
fetch up out of the past, even to the minutest 
detail, the whole of that little period of time 
during which I waited, with bated breath and 
condensed expectancy, to see a god ! 

The river was bearing us on at a rate of 
speed which, but for the silent evenness of the 
motion, would have been frightful under better 
circumstances. But the wood of which the 
pirogue was made — it must have been yellow 
tulip — seemed so unsound and semi-disinte- 
grated that the wonder was it did not dissolve 
into a flake of vegetable mould upon the water, 
and thus let us sink ! 

A vast white bird, probably a snowy heron 
the Garzetta candidissima of our naturalists, 
swept majestically across from side to side of 
the river, directly over the mysterious shining 
line and just hitherward of the pale mist, 
quickly losing itself among the trees. Again 
I saw, or imagined, shadowy forms stealing 
through rifts in the flower-sprent glooms of the 
woods. But they were less satisfactory than 
the dimmest forms of a dream. I could not 
follow them a second of time. 

A broad booming heralded our approach to 
the cataract. We felt no motion, so steady 
was our sweep, and yet we were leaving the 
dreamy wind behind us. Halcyon, with erect 
and dishevelled crest, led on in an ecstasy of 
chirp and flutter. I became aware, through 
some slight, ominously decisive movement of 
the guide, that he was preparing for a supreme 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 91 

effort. We were nearly opposite a grand 
opening in those stately trees, out of which 
seemed to issue the silvery line which cut the 
river. I leaned forward, with suspended 
breath, to catch a glimpse right down it as we 
should pass. The gods were there, I knew 
they were ; I should see some one of them, at 
least, if only a sylvan faun or satyr, or a dryad 
slowly withdrawing into the heart of a tree. 
Deus ecce I Deus. 

That great white bird came out of the shad- 
ows of the woods again, and curving its flight 
down the stream seemed to melt into the mist. 
A sensation of dewy coolness crept over me, 
as if shaken from the rorid sandals of some 
passing naiad. The bank of the river opposite 
to the ridge's precipice now presented a gay, 
almost fantastic appearance. Tall, aquatic 
grasses, thinly interspersed with certain scar- 
let-spiked riparian weeds, were sown at the 
water's verge; their long slender stalks and 
semi-translucent leaves, waving to the impulse 
of air and water-ripple, sent forth a sort of 
shimmer like that which Virgil intended to 
describe with the phrase " Turn silvis scena 
coruscis''—?i waving motion with light flashing 
and flickering through. Right opposite this a 
narrow, vertical rent intersected the ridge, and 
through it an almost level finger of the sun 
reached to caress the grass. Just as we passed 
I noted, by an instantaneous glance, a strange 
and beautiful thing— a troop of dragon-flies, 
purple-bodied and silver-winged, filing rapidly, 
in open order of ones and twos, across the 
sunlight into the dewy recesses of the river's 
fringe. Each gaudy insect, as it flew, wavered 
in the air so dreamily and eccentrically that 



92 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

somehow I was reminded by their course of 
those shadowy, silvery lines in the blades of 
Damascus daggers. 

We slipped on and on, still following the 
now madly careering halcyon. For the mer- 
est point of time, not long enough for an eye 
to twinkle, we were opposite the rift in the 
woods and trembling on the verge of mystery. 
I looked down the open vista and saw some- 
thing, I know not what — a form or a shadow, 
an image conjured up by my imagination, or 
only a blending of the glooms and gleams by 
force of distance and velocity — but a new ele- 
ment was added to my nature, I felt a great 
thrill. A new joy took root in my heart. A 
new flower blew open in my soul. Accipio 
agnoscoque deos / 

It seemed that down that aisle I could look 
to the remotest age of time ; and out of it, 
blowing into my eager face, I felt the un- 
changed, the unchangeable spirit of Eld ! 
Was it, or not, a face that I saw ? Can I ever 
know? The flowing hair, like blown supple 
ringlets of gold floss, the gray deep eyes, the 
divinely smiling lips ; were they not there ? 
And the shining body and agile limbs, did I 
only fancy I saw them ? How shall I ever be 
sure ? Of Dea certe. An indescribable some- 
thing, as of that whole landscape melting and 
vanishing, by a sudden and noiseless deflagra- 
tion, followed close upon this fortunate mo- 
ment. With a harsh, maniacal cry of delight, 
the belted halcyon leaped over the coruscating 
line into the silvery mist beyond. And, like 
an arrow flung from the bent bow of the river, 
we were whirled after him into the vast fanged 
jaws of the canon. 



THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 93 

I felt our pirogue leap and shiver ; I heard 
awful noises, as of battles and storms and tu- 
multuous applaudings, as of a million clapping 
hands, as we rushed down into the rent hill. 
Sic^ sicjuvat ire sub umbras ! All above us the 
mist and spume boiled and rolled ; all below 
us the mad waves leaped and fought ; all 
round us the gray, wet fragments of granite 
offered destruction. Nature's wildest frenzy 
of passion was bearing us down, down, down ! 
O, the calm madness that seized me ! It was 
awe traced in marble — it was terror frozen in 
ice ! O, the sweet vision, so suddenly mine, 
so abruptly gone ! A mysterious joy, like the 
memory of a heavenly dream, lingered in my 
heart, down deeper than any fear of death 
could go. 

Deeper and deeper we plunged down be- 
tween the dank, fantastically grooved jaws of 
the gorge, till the mist and darkness blended 
into one, and the thunder of the stream in its 
agony was appalling. Even this did not 
drown the metallic laugh of the halcyon as it 
led on through that horrid tumult. I felt a 
wet wind rushing over me, I saw the spume 
sparkle like phosphor, whilst the shark-like 
teeth of the walls on either hand drew closer 
upon me. 

How deep the ecstasy below us ! How far- 
reaching the immitigable storm-mist above us! 
How old and worn the stolid stones about us ! 
O threshold of the gods, what a distance be- 
hind us ! O sweet, calm, every-day world, 
how infinitely removed from us ! 

Finally we felt a mighty swell lift us and 
savagely shake us. A heavy spray dashed 
over us, and our frail vessel quivered and 



94 B V- IV A YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

quaked, as if in a convulsion of pain. Sud- 
denly the gorge closed up till the slimy walls 
thereof oppressed us and its jagged teeth 
grazed us on either side. But on we rushed, 
tempest behind us, thunder before us, the 
blackness of utter darkness all about us, and 
at last, with a mighty explosion of all terrors, 
we were hurled like a missile from some giant 
engine — a very missile, indeed — forth from 
the grim, stony lips of that awful fissure, reel- 
ing and spinning far out upon the swift, level 
bosom of the little river lapsing into the open 
country. 

The evening farewell of the sun was glorify- 
ing the distant mountain lines, the sweet 
maple trees on either side of us were waving 
betwixt gloom and splendor, and the breeze 
was a deep, tender sigh of relief. 

" Unde hcEc tam clara repente 
Tempestas ? " 

The belted halcyon turned aside in his flight, 
and perching upon a bough laughed his fill at 
us as we drew past him. The roar of the rap- 
ids receded and faded, leaving at last in my 
heart a tender melody which never can depart. 
I had hovered on the Threshold of the 
Gods' 



BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 

I WAS once following a tireless guide 
through a wild mountain region of the South, 
when, in answer to a direct question, he de- 
livered himself as follows: — 

"What makes me alius a-nibblin' an' 
a-browsin' of the bushes an' things as I goes 
along ? Well, I dunno, 'less hit's kase I've 
sorter tuck a notion to. A feller needs a heap 
o' nerve ef he 'spects to be much account for 
a deer-hunter in these here hills, an' I kinder 
b'lieve hit keeps a feller's heart stiddy an' his 
blood pure for to nibble an' browse kinder 
like a deer does. You know a deer is alius 
strong an' active, an' hit is everlastin'ly a- 
nibblin' an' a-browsin'. Ef hit's good for the 
annymel hit orter be good for the feller." 

This philosophy immediately gained a lodg- 
ment in my mind. I delightedly took up the 
seeds of suggestion let fall by the strong- 
Hmbed, steady-nerved mountaineer, and forced 
them to rapid quickening and utmost growth. 
The old alchemists in their search for the 
elixir of life ought to have known that the 
birds and the animals of the wild woods had 
long ago discovered it. How many sick deer, 
or bears, or partridges, have ever been found 
by hunters or woodsmen ? For twenty years, as 
boy and man, I have been an untiring and per- 
sistent roamer in the wildest nooks and cor- 
ners of our American forests ; and during this 
period, I have never found a deer, a bear, a 
squirrel, a turkey, a grouse, a quail, or any 



96 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

wild bird, suffering from any fatal ailment 
other than wounds. When their food is 
plentiful all kinds of wild things thrive. Of 
course, when unusually hard winters come, 
and food cannot be found, the non-migratory 
birds and animals suffer, often to death, from 
hunger and cold. But this is accident rather 
than anything else. Take a healthy child into 
the woods, and see how naturally and surely it 
will fall to nibbling at the buds, and bark, and 
roots of things. There seems to be an innate 
hunger for this sort of food, lying dormant in 
every human being until called into activity by 
some association, accident, or exigency. 

Now, I am not going into the dear old 
theory of the botanical doctors touching na- 
ture's remedies for man's ailments. I am not 
a physician, and I favor no special school of 
medicine. But I do maintain that it is good 
for man — and woman, too — to nibble and 
browse. Go bite the bud of the spice-wood, 
or the bark of the sassafras, and tell me 
whether you feel a new element slip into your 
nature. No sooner do you taste for the first 
time this wild, racy flavor, than you recognize 
its perfect adaptation to a need of your life. 
Nor is this need a mere physical one. Some- 
how the fragrance and flavor that satisfy it 
reach the thought-generating part of one, and 
tinge one's imagination and fancy with new 
colors. 

I remember, with a steady delight, some days 
spent with the ginseng-diggers of North Car- 
olina. It was there that I first tasted this 
celebrated American root, and discovered a lik- 
ing for its charming, aromatic bitter-sweetness. 
No wonder the Chinese prized it above gold ! 



BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 97 

These ginseng-diggers — or " sang-diggers," 
as they are called — are queer folk ; very inter- 
esting in a way, ignorant, superstitious, strong, 
stingy, and honest — a sort of mountain tribe 
to themselves. I followed a company of them 
around the jutting cliffs and fertile " benches " 
of the Carolina mountain region, until I really 
had grown to like their careless, nomadic life, 
with its flavor of chestnuts and ginseng. In 
the spring is the time for browsing; in the 
autumn comes the nibbling season. The 
squirrels begin eating the buds of the hickory 
trees so soon as the sap has risen into them 
sufficiently to make them swell. Your know- 
ing squirrel-hunter cleans up his rifle about 
this time, and visits every hickory tree in his 
neighborhood. Somewhat later the grand 
tulip trees begin blooming, and then the squir- 
rels transfer their attention to them. A few 
weeks of browsing in the spring woods will 
make one acquainted with the characteristic 
taste and fragrance of almost every tree, shrub, 
and plant of the region. 

True, there are a few — very few indeed — 
poisonous things, and these must be avoided. 
Nature has her evil streaks, running at wide 
intervals through her opulence of good ; but 
they are easily discoverable. Who would 
ever be so obtuse to danger as to nibble at the 
buds of the poison ivy? This browsing-time 
is also the season of our sweetest and most 
charming flowers. While one is biting through 
pungent barks and aromatic buds^ one also 
gets the benefit of perfumes as wild and witch- 
ing as are the blooms from which they exhale. 
I do not know how to explain the influence of 
the bitters and sweets, the acids and sub-acids, 
7 



98 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

the aromas and perfumes of wild things ; nor 
am I sure that explanation would be profitable, 
if possible. To taste the perfectly distilled 
honey that lurks in the red-clover bloom is a 
sufficient demonstration of this influence. A 
subtle thrill, elusive as it is fascinating, follows 
the touch of the tongue to this infinitesimal 
philter. It was made for the bumblebee ; but 
your pastoral man may profit by the insect's 
example. If Rossetti, while bending over a 
woodspurge, had been less an artist and more 
a poet and philosopher, he might have dis- 
covered more than he expresses in : — 

" One thing then learnt remains to me, — 
The woodspurge has a cup of three." 

Compare the flowers of Tennyson and Keats 
with those of Baudelaire — 

" Des fleurs se pament dans un coin" — 

and the whole fearful difference between the 
sweets of nature and the filth and rottenness 
where those sweets are wanting, will rush upon 
your consciousness. There is something more 
than the mere shimmer of rhetoric in Virgil's 

*' Tum silvis scena coruscis 
Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra." 

There is in the words a suggestion of what 
woodsy freshness and fragrance, of what spices 
and resins, that grove may hold. Howells 
brings to mind the same possibilities when, 
in his poem called " Vagary," he sings — 

" Deep in my heart the vision is, 
Of meadow grass and meadow trees 
Blown silver in the summer breeze." 

There is a smack of browsing in such a verse 
as — 



BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 99 

" But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the 
meadow." 

And when Keats forgets the Greek myths and 
turns to pastoral memories, how true and fresh 
and fine his note •, — 

" I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs ; 
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet 
Wherewith the seasonable month endows 
The grass, the thicket, the fruit-tree wild." 

But we poor clay mortals, who have never 
been able to get within the charmed life of the 
poets, can have our sip of honey-dew, and our 
morsel of wild balsamic resin, our mouthful of 
pungent buds, and our taste of aromatic roots, 
notwithstanding our coarse natures, just as 
well as these successors of the gods. Still, I 
fancy that it is the literary man and the artist 
who get the most out of our out-door browsing 
and nibbling. Wild plums and haws and ber- 
ries, papaws, nuts, grapes, and all the fruits of 
ungardened nature, have something in them to 
feed originality. One cannot chew a bit of 
slippery-elm bark without acknowledging the 
racy charm of nature at first hand. Children 
like all these things, because their tastes are 
pure and natural. Poets like them, because 
poets are grown-up children. Painters like 
them, because painters affect to interpret 
poetry and nature. Clods, like you and me, 
reader, like them, because they are racy and 
good ; because they take out of our mouths 
the taste of artificial food, and because they 
seem to strengthen our connection with un- 
trimmed and uncultured nature. They are, in 
their way of laying hold on our taste, like the 
poetic myths of the Greeks. They cloy for a 



100 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

time, but when their season comes round again 
the zest comes too 

Was it not Adonis, as Shakespeare has it, to 
whom the birds — 

" Would bring mulberries, and ripe red cherries "? 

To me the flavor of our American wild cher- 
ries has always been especially alluring. So, 
too, the service-berries, with their wild red 
wine, have tempted me to many a dangerous 
feat of climbing. Often in the dense huckle- 
berry swamps of the South I have refused to 
be frightened from my purple feast even by 
the keen whir of the rattlesnake's tail, though 
the deadly sound would make my faithful dog 
desert me in cowardly haste. 

Along the banks of the streams of Georgia 
and South Carolina grows a grape, known by 
the musical name of muscadine, which I esteem 
as altogether the wildest and raciest of all 
wild fruit. Its juice has the musty taste of 
old wine along with a strange aromatic quality 
peculiarly its own. On splendid moonlight 
nights I have swung in the muscadine vines, 
slowly feasting on the great purple globes, 
while the raccoons fought savagely in the trees 
hard by, and a clear river gently murmured 
below. Next to the muscadine among wild 
fruits I rate the papaw as best. It is gen- 
uinely wild, rich, racy, and, to me, palatable 
and digestible. I once sent a box of papaws 
to a great Boston author, whose friendship I 
chanced to possess, and was much disap- 
pointed to learn that the musty odor of the 
fruit was very distasteful to him. He fancied 
that the papaws were rotten ! I dare say he 
never tasted them ; and if he had, their flavor 



BROWSING AND NIBBLING. loi 

would have been too rank and savage for his 
endurance. : 

The gums and resins of our woods are few. 
The sweet-gum, or liquid amber, is the only 
genuinely fine morsel of the sort to be found 
within the boundaries of the United States. 
It is a clear amber fluid (flowing from any cut 
or wound in the tree), which soon hardens into 
a stiff, translucent yellow wax, possessing a 
pleasing aromatic taste and odor, strangely 
fascinating. One does not care to eat it ; but, 
once a lump of it goes into one's mouth, one 
chews it until one's jaws are tired. I remem- 
ber, when I was a very little child, going to a 
backwoods school in Missouri, where all the 
pupils, both great and small, would chew 
liquid amber from morning till night; the 
teacher chewed tobacco. 

Browsing and nibbling has led me to taste 
the inner bark of nearly every kind of tree 
growing in American woods. The hickory 
tree has a sap almost as sweet as that of the 
maple, but it mingles with the sweet a pun- 
gency and a slightly acrid element of taste at 
once pleasing and repellent to the pampered 
tongue. The oaks have much tannin in their 
bark, the astringency of which draws one's 
lips like green persimmons ; but the very 
innermost part, next the wood, is slightly 
mucilaginous and faintly sweet. Speaking of 
persimmons — after a few sharp frosts this 
wild fruit becomes mellow and rich, but to the 
last retains a certain drawing quality, a trace 
of that astringency already mentioned, which 
keeps it from being a favorite, save with the 
opossums. 

There is no other woodland influence, how- 



102 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

ever, so strong and fine as the perfumes, odors, 
and aromas. Of these each season has its 
own — the perfume of spring flowers, the odors 
of summer mosses and sweet punk, the aroma 
of buds and barks and gums. Even in mid- 
winter, when a warm time comes, and the 
snow melts, and the ground is thoroughly 
thawed, there are woodsy odors borne about 
by the drowsy winds. In fact, the fragrance 
of January is sweeter and more subtly elusive 
than that of May. Go nibble the brown, 
pointed buds of the beech tree in midwinter, 
and you will find how well the individuality of 
the trees is condensed in those laminated little 
spikes. You taste the perfume of tassels and 
the fragrance of young leaves ; there is an 
aromatic hint of coming nuts. You may almost 
taste the songs of the spring birds! What 
words these buds are ! How prophetic ! 
We bite them, and, lo ! the spring rises in a 
vision ! Its poem is read in advance. 

I recollect a clear fountain of cold water 
around which grew festoons of cress and 
mint. I had been chasing the wild things 
all the morning, as a true huntsman will, 
and now I was tired and thirsty. At such 
a time what could be more welcome than 
mint and water ? How soothing the fragrant 
flavor and the cooling draught ! Then came 
the biting spiciness of the cress, to reinvigor- 
ate my nerve withal. Out of my pouch I drew 
a cake of maple sugar, and feasted like a god. 

When winter begins to come on, the nuts 
come too. I cannot understand the taste of 
those who do not like the rich oily kernels 
of the butternut, the hickory nut, and the 
sweet acorns of the pine oak. Squirrels know 



BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 



103 



which side of a nut is buttered. They have 
long ago learned that it is the inside. From 
Florida to Michigan one may run the gamut of 
nuts, beginning with the lily-nuts, or water 
chinquepins, and running up to the great 
black-walnut, including every shade of flavor 
and fatness. They are all good. They were 
made to eat in the open air ; and he who takes 
them, as the squirrels do, after vigorous ex- 
ercise in the woods, will find great comfort in 
them. I cannot rank the artist or poet very 
high whose stomach is too aristocratic for 
wild berries, nuts, and aromatic bark. I fear 
that such an one has long since allowed 
that trace of savage vigor, which made him 
of kin to Pan and Apollo, to slip away and be 
lost. Shall we doubt that Burns got his sweet 
strength and freshness, in a great measure, 
out of the cool, fragrant loam his ploughshare 
turned ? The gracious ways of nature are so 
simple and so manifold. She gives up to us 
by such subtle vehicles of conveyance the 
precious essences of suggestion. She draws 
us back from overculture to renew our virility 
with her simples. She gives us dew instead 
of philosophy, perfumes instead of science, 
flowers in place of art, fruit in lieu of lectures, 
and nuts instead of sermons. 

In the manifest life of an individual no ele- 
ment is so pleasing as that trace of force 
which suggests his kinship to wild nature. 
Out of this springs a sweet stream of originality 
and freshness, a sincerity and outrightness of 
thought and action, of great value per se. I 
have met men whose talk was spicy and aro- 
matic ; from whose lips simple words fell with a 
new, racy meaning. Their thoughts were red- 



1 04 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

olent of the odors and essences of buds and 
flowers, and sweet, mossy solitudes. Theirs 
had been the oil of nuts instead of the oil of 
the lamp. 

There is no safety in culture if it leads to 
artificiality. There must be a safety-valve to 
any high-pressure system, social, moral, or in- 
tellectual. The connection with the sources 
of nature must be kept perfect. Poetry, 
painting, sculpture, and all the cognate ele- 
ments of high education and sweet intellectual 
attainment, must become mere manifestations 
of a diseased fancy and imagination whenever 
this connection shall be permanently severed. 
It matters little by what slender streams na- 
ture feeds us, so that we get the food at first 
hand. History seems to teach us that utter 
artificiality is the forerunner of decadence. On 
the other hand, in the flowering time of a peo- 
ple's youth come their geniuses. England 
can have no Shakespeare now, Germany no 
Goethe, Italy no Dante. Culture has gone 
too far. The wires are down between nature 
and the leaders of fashion in fine art. True, 
we have the microscope in the hands of hun- 
dreds of analysts and fact-gatherers ; but this 
serves only the turn of the men who despise 
every element of nature that cannot be con- 
trolled for the furtherance of the demands of 
artificial life. 

Reader, let us go out occasionally to browse 
and nibble, and gather the savage sweets of 
primeval things ; to revel in the crude mate- 
rials of creation ; to get the essential oils, the 
spices, the fragrance, the pungent elements 
of originality. 



OUT-DOOR INFLUENCES IN 
LITERATURE. 

The earth is the great reservoir of phys- 
ical forces, and whilst no scientist has yet 
been able to discover how intimate or how per- 
fect is the connection between the mental and 
the physical, there exists, no doubt, a correla- 
tion between the processes by which the body 
and the soul are kept healthy and vigorous by 
draughts on the great reserves of Nature. 
One grows tired of books and cloyed with all 
manner of art. Then comes a hunger and a 
thirst for Nature. Real thought-gathering is 
like berry-gathering — one must go to the wild 
vines for the racy-flavored fruit. Art and Na- 
ture are really the antipodes of each other — 
one is original, the other second-hand. When 
we go from the library or the studio to the 
woods and fields, we go to get back what 
Art has robbed us of — the freshness of Nature. 
Art presents compositions ; Nature offers the 
original elements. The suggestions of Nature 
come, as the flowers and leaves and breezes 
come — out of the mysterious, invisible gener- 
ator ; but Art merely reflects its suggestions 
back upon Nature. 

What genuine poet or novelist has not caught 
his charmingest conceits from some subtle and 
indescribable influence of out-door things? 
In-door poets, like Dante G. Rossetti, always 
lack the dewy freshness of Helicon, the thymy 
fragrance of Hybla, no matter how much of 



I o6 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

the true maker's labor limce. may appear in 
their works. Even Poe and Hawthorne dis- 
close too heavy a trace of the must and mould 
of the closet. Each stands alone, inimitable, 
in his field, but lacking that balmy, odorous 
freshness of the morning woods and pastures, 
when the convolvulus and the violet are in 
bloom. We should have little faith in the 
bird-song described by either one of those 
wizards of romance. 

" The skies they were ashen and sober, 
The leaves they were crisped and sere," 

in all their works. Cheerfulness and enthusi- 
asm have always seemed to me to belong of 
right to the best genius. Shakespeare exempli- 
fies it ; the sublime audacity of Napoleon I. 
instances it. But Shakespeare was a poacher, 
and Napoleon loved to dwell out of doors. I 
hold that communion with Nature generates 
lofty ideas, feeds noble ambitions. The only 
way to lengthen a yard-measure is to gauge 
each new length of cloth by the preceding one, 
and not by the yardstick. The growth will be 
slow, but amazingly sure. So in Art, if we 
cast aside the standards and permit such ac- 
cretion as Nature suggests. 

But there must be some excuse for going 
out alone with Nature other than the avowed 
purpose of filching her secrets and accumulat- 
ing her suggestions ; for, as a matter of fact, 
nearly or quite all of the available literary or 
artistic materials caught from her great reser- 
voirs come without the asking, and at the 
moment when they are least expected. Then, 
too, the human mind seems to have no volun- 
tary receptivity. The power of taking in new 



INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 107 

elements seems most active in the brain when 
the pleasurable excitement of a rational pas- 
time is upon it. The artist is often surprised, 
while aimlessly sketching in the presence of 
Nature ; at the sudden coming on of a genu- 
ine " inspiration" — a suggestion leaping out 
of some accidental touch, or out of some elu- 
sive, shadowy change in the phases of things. 

The direct study of Nature is dry, and its re- 
sults, however useful and entertaining, far from 
satisfactory from a literary or artistic stand- 
point. As one can see an object better in the 
night by not looking straight at it, so the in- 
direct view of Nature is best for the discovery 
of those inspiring morsels upon which the gods 
used to feed, and with which the poet, the 
novelist, and the painter of to-day delight to 
stimulate themselves. But the gods were hunt- 
ers and athletes, as well as lyrists and song- 
sters. They bent the bow with as much ease 
and delight as they blew in the hollow reed or 
thrummed on the stringed shell. They robbed 
the wild bees of their honey, and chased the 
deer over the hills ; they followed the streams 
of Arcadia, and haunted the fountains and 
glens of both Italy and Greece. The poets are 
said to be the successors of the gods. The 
gums and resins, the spices and saps, the per- 
fumes and subtle essences of Nature make their 
nectar and ambrosia. It is the presence of 
this flavor of Nature that discloses the work of 
a genuine genius. No amount of cunning arti- 
sanship can create, it can only build. Genius 
works with animate materials and essences ; 
its 

" Conscious stones to beauty grow." 



io8 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

In a bit of verse I once tried to express my 
idea of the true poet : — 

" He is a poet strong and true 
Who loves wild thyme and honey-dew, 
Who, like a brown bee, works and sings, 
With morning freshness on his wings, 
And a gold burden on his thighs, 
The pollen-dust of centuries." 

This pollen-dust is to be found in the old 
woods as well as in the old books. The 
flowers of poesy are but impressionist sketches 
of the flowers of Nature. The little bloom of 
the partridge-berry has sweeter perfume than 
any lyric of Theocritus or Horace. From the 
proper point of view the big, vigorous flower 
of the tulip-tree is as full of racy, unused sug- 
gestions as it is of stamens. Virgil and Ten- 
nyson, Theocritus and Emerson, Sappho and 
Keats, have filled their songs with the most 
delicately elusive elements of Nature caught 
from out-door life. They are the half-dozen 
poets of the world who have come near in 
their work to the methods of the bee. The 
honey-cell and the poem are of divine art — the 
honey and the idea of the poem are of divine 
nature. Rossetti and Poe builded lovely cells, 
but they had no wild-flower honey with which 
to fill them ; theirs was a marvellous nectar, 
but it was gathered from books and art. " Vol- 
umes of forgotten lore " served them, instead 
of brooks, and fields, and woods, and birds, 
and flowers. 

Now, literature is not the whole of life, 
nor is the study of Nature the whole secret of 
literary inspiration. But recreation of body 
and mind is drawn from obscure and various 



INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 09 

sources, and the well-rounded genius seems to 
feed itself upon Nature much more than upon 
books. A book is most useful as a literary 
helper, when it may be used as a glass with 
which to better view Nature. I would not be 
understood as saying that all worthy literature 
is or should be a mere interpretation of out- 
door life ; far from it. Out-door life, I may 
say, furnishes the inspiration, the enthusiasm, 
the freshness. It furnishes the water for the 
clay, it gives the hand its certainty, the mind 
its new leases upon youth. It does not make 
the mind nor the hand ; it merely informs 
them with the creative effluence of Nature, as 
Thoreau would express it. It has a fertilizing 
power — this lonely communion with the out- 
door forms of life — which one may trace in the 
best works of the geniuses of all ages. Pan, 
when he pursued the flying Syrinx, and at last 
clasped an armful of reeds instead of the 
nymph, very accurately typified the poet. He 
took the reeds and made of them his pipe. 
He had caught the idea of music from the 
sounds of the rustling leaves and stems. If 
you would like to fully understand the mean- 
ing of this myth of Pan and Syrinx go clasp 
an armful of wild green reeds and hold your 
ear close to them. You will hear the sound 
of washing seas and rippling rivers and flow- 
ing breezes all blending together ; voices from 
vast distances and snatches of immemorial 
song will come to you. Like Pan you will 
long for a pipe, that you may express what 
has been suggested to you by the reeds. 

Awhile ago I said that direct, conscious 
study of Nature was not best for gathering 
those impressions most valuable to the poet 



no BV-IVAVS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

and artist. Thoreau is a striking example of 
a poet spoiled by this direct study. Compare 
his poetry with that of Keats or Tennyson or 
Emerson, and it will be discovered that his ob- 
vious attitudinizing before Nature prevents 
him from appearing sincere, simple, and fresh 
in his conceits. It seems that the available 
material which one gets from Nature, save 
for scientific purposes, must be received aslant, 
so to speak — must be discovered by indirect 
vision — and while one is looking for some- 
thing else. Thus while Thoreau was besieg- 
ing Nature for her poetic essences, he failed to 
find them, though Keats had stumbled upon 
them apparently by accident^ 

*' What melodies are these ? 
They sound as through the whispering of trees." 

If ever the songs of a poet 

" Come as through bubbling honey," 

and 

" In trammels of perverse deliciousness," 

the songs of Keats did, and in them we may 
find in the best measure the influences of the 
indirect study of Nature. 

Now, there are few persons who, like Keats, 
will absorb these influences without some stim- 
ulus other than the poet's love of solitude •, 
nor is solitude for its own sake wholesome. 
On the contrary, it is inimical to healthy phys- 
ical and mental development. Keats' might 
have lived to finish all his " divine fragments" 
if he had been an enthusiastic canoeist, archer, 
or bicyclist. He died of consumption at the 
age of twenty-five years ! If William Cullen 



INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE, 1 1 1 

Bryant had possessed Keats's genius, of if 
Keats had had Bryant's physique ! Think of 
the boy-author of Eiidymion singing till he was 
eighty ! And yet such a thing might be if 
recreation were regular and judicious. If 
Keats were alive to-day he would not be ninety 
years old, and yet his poems have been classics 
for more than sixty years. 

The study of Nature, as I have said, should 
be indirect, in order to perfect recreation. 
Some cheerful sport, to absorb one's direct at- 
tention, is the best aid to the end in view, and 
to my mind the best sport is that which neces- 
sarily takes one into the woods and along the 
streams, where wild flowers blow and wild 
birds sing, and where the flavor of sap and the 
fragrance of gums and resins are in the 
breezes. If I were a poet I think I should be 
one of that class described as 

" Poets, a race long unconfined and free, 
Still fond and proud of savage liberty." 

I could not be the one of the garret and 
the crust ; better a hollow tree and locusts and 
wild honey. The redeeming feature of Walt 
Whitman's deservedly tabooed, and yet deserv- 
edly admired. Leaves of Grass, is the sweet, 
ever-recurring wood-note, the sincere voice of 
Nature, half strangled as it is in incoherent 
sounds — a feature that affects one like the 
notes of a wood-thrush heard in the depths of 
a dismal, swampy hollow. Too much time 
spent in the streets and crowds of the cities — 
too much knowledge of the brutal side of life 
— has given us a Whitman, a Baudelaire, and 
a Zola. Too much knowledge of Nature gave 
us a Thoreau. It is a curious fact that, so 



112 BV-WAVS AJVD BIRD-NO TES. 

soon as a people have grown beyond the study 
and the love of out-door nature, their literature 
begins to be what French literature now is — 
a literature without any true poetry. Daudet, 
for instance, is a poet, but he cannot make 
poetry. His novels are spiced with intrigues 
and immoralities, instead of with the flavor of 
out-door life. Zola sees nothing but the 
tragedies of the gutter and the brothel. He 
never dreams of green fields and melodious 
woods ; he finds nothing worthy of his art in 
rural scenes or in honest, earnest life. He 
never goes into solitude with Nature. The lit- 
erature of England, from Chaucer down to 
Dickens and William Black, is full of the fra- 
grance, so to speak, of out-door life, and it will 
be so as long as the English man and the 
English woman remain true to their love of 
all kinds of open-air pastimes. The deer, the 
pheasant, the blackcock, the trout, and the 
fox, have done much to fence the poetry and 
fiction or our mother-country against the 
French tendencies and influences. 

But American literature is beginning to 
feel, in a certain way, the effect of much love 
of Parisian manners. Henry James, Jr., who 
just now leads our novelists, is much more 
French than American or English in his liter- 
ary methods. His theory is, that the aim of 
the novelist is to represent life ; but he no- 
where recognizes " out-doors " or out-of-doors 
things as a part of life. Life to him means 
fashionable, social life — nothing more. The 
life of which Hawthorne wrote i?> passe X.o him. 
From his stand-point he is right. If realism, 
as the critics now define it, is a genuine revo- 
lution in literature, it may be a long while be- 



INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 1 3 

fore any otherfiction than Mr. James's very 
pleasant sort will be in demand. He is master 
of his method, and has made the most of his 
theory. But, without finding fault with Mr. 
James's charming novels, it may be asked if 
they would not be better were it possible for 
the author to inject into them something of 
William Black's knowledge of out-door things, 
and to give them the color and atmosphere de. 
manded by the places where their scenes are 
laid. Social atmosphere he does give to per- 
fection ; but of the air his people breathe he 
knows nothing. He never sets his story in a 
landscape ; its entourage is always an artificial 
one ; he frames it, like an artist, with a frame ex- 
actly suited to its tone ; but it would look as 
well in one place as another. In reading his 
stories we are thoroughly charmed, and would 
not know where to change a word ; but we 
know all along that we are reading a story. 
He does not take us away from the spot where 
we are reading ; but he chains us to our chair 
with the spell of his " representations of life " 
until the end is reached. 

Now, a little different treatment would 
change all this. The color and the atmosphere 
of the place should be added, as with the brush 
of the painter, so that we would find ourselves 
on the spot, feel the air, smell the perfumes, 
see the varied features of the region round 
about, as well as talk with the people and 
share their life. Let it be understood that I 
do not criticise Mr. James. He is a prince of 
novelists. I merely attempt to show that he 
might add to his charming stories the freshness 
of the breezes, the bird-songs, and the flowers, 
8 



114 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

without abating in the least his placid realism 
or endangering his reputation for merciless 
analysis. 

But even so delicately refined a novelist as 
Mr. James loses less by the lack of a knowl- 
edge of out-door things than does the least of 
minor poets. The singer must not, cannot, 
rely upon any other reserve .than Nature, 
from which to draw the freshness and racy 
flavor that every true poem must have. Still 
it must be remembered that mere descriptive 
writing, no matter how true to Nature, is not 
what gives that " smack of Helicon " of which 
Mr. Lowell speaks. The true critical test is 
one that will discover any trace of the simplic- 
ity, the artlessness, and the self-sufficiency of 
Nature. Whatever is truly fresh and original 
in literature will be found to contain something 
not acquired from books, nor from observation 
of society, nor yet from introspection ; this 
comes, one might say, from the soil and the 
air by a growth like that of the flowers. I be- 
lieve it is due, in nearly every case, to out- 
door recreation. It is felt on almost every 
page of Emerson, Tennyson, and William 
Black, and it is just as charming in a story 
like A Princess of T/iule, as it is in Ifi Memo- 
riam or in Wood Notes. John Burroughs has 
shown what a delightful study Nature may 
be to him who plays with her for the mere 
sake of the play. He has given us the ex- 
treme of what may be called wind-rustled 
and dew-dashed literature. What a grand 
novelist Henry James and John Burroughs 
would make if they could be welded together ! 
Life would then be represented sympathet- 



INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 1 5 

ically from centre to circumference — from the 
heart of an oak to the outermost garment of 
a 'Mude." 

Mr. Hardy's novel, But y.'t a Woman, and 
Mr. Crawford's Mr. Isaacs, leaped at once into 
popular favor on account of the freshness that 
was in them. In both stories a knowledge of 
out-door life is blended with a keen insight 
into the most interesting mysteries of the 
human heart. Mr. Isaacs was not only a 
master polo-player and a crack shot ; he was 
also a philosopher and a lover of no common 
sort. In But yet a Woman the descriptive 
passages and the epigrammatic paragraphs 
serve as a fixitive for the story, setting it per- 
manently, and giving it an air of its own. The 
physical atmosphere is as wdiolesome and 
sweet as the moral spirit is sane and pure. 
One would suspect that the story had been 
written in the open air, or, at least, in the 
country, with the library windows wide open. 
Indeed, sunshine and air are as antiseptic and 
deodorizing in literature as in the field of phys- 
ical operations. Even Baudelaire occasion- 
ally, under the influence of a sea-breeze, wrote 
such a poem as Parfiim Exotique, or La Cheve- 
lure. He had a charming knowledge of 
marine effects, and it seems to me that his 
verse 

" Infinis bercements du loisir enbaume " 

is enough of itself to immortalize him. It is 
a whole poem. One sees the warm, creamy 
tropical water, feels the long, lazy swell, the in- 
finite idle rocking, the balmy leisure, and 
takes in, as by a breath, the illusive charm of 
the ever-mysterious sea. Buchanan Read's 



1 1 6 BV-JVAVS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

Drifting might be condensed into that one 
line — 

" Infinis bercements du loisir embaume." 

In fact, the few poems worthy the name, writ- 
ten by Baudelaire, were made out of the sweet, 
warm shreds of his out-door life, while on a 
voyage in the far East. Even in France, this 
freshness of Nature is recognized and relished. 
In Nu7na Roii7nesta7i M. Daudet has, as one 
might say, wafted the odors of Provence 
through the streets of Paris. The critics felt 
the atmospheric change, and went to the win- 
dows to see the mistral flurrying along the 
boulevards. So, in America, when Bret Harte 
and Joaquin Miller sent their stories and poems 
over the mountains and deserts from our far 
Pacific coast, it was their freshness — their 
woodsy, dewy, out-door flavor that recom- 
mended them. A happy blending of the 
bucolic with the latest fashionable tendencies 
— a welding together of the pastoral and the 
ultra-urban, made a great success of An Earn- 
est Trifler. It would be easy to multiply in- 
stances. The proofs are perfect that the in- 
fluences of out-door life upon literature are of 
the subtlest and most interesting nature. 
Whilst every one must admit the paramount 
importance of human life in every form of lit- 
erary composition, still the side-light of out- 
door nature is absolutely necessary to the his- 
torian, the poet, and the novelist, and he who 
neglects it fails in one of the prime require- 
ments of the best art. As well might the 
painter draw a group of figures without color, 
atmosphere, or background, and expect to 
win the highest fame, as for the novelist or the 



I NFL UENCES IN LITER A TUBE. 1 1 7 

poet to depend wholly upon human actions and 
conversations for his effects. The moral of 
all this need not be appended. Out-door 
life is the great recreator and regenerator. Na- 
ture is steeped in the elixir which has power 
to freshen and renew our highest facilities. If 
" the proper study of mankind is man," still 
it is safe to say that sound lungs, healthy 
blood, a good appetite, and a clear brain, are 
indispensable to such study, and are to be had 
only by those who breathe pure air, digest their 
food, and read the human heart by the light 
of the sun. 



A FORTNIGHT IN A PALACE OF 
REEDS. 

When you reach the top of the bold hill 
known as Cedar Loaf, you may see the Coo- 
sawattee River winding away, in a direction 
diagonal to the length of the valley below, 
sparkling and rippling between its dense 
fringes of canebrake. There are broad rifts 
in the forests of pine, hickory, oak and tulip, 
through which shine the grassy glades or min- 
iature prairies, peculiar to the North Georgia 
region. The old Indian Ford, from which the 
serpentine trail of the Cherokees used to 
wriggle away like a snake, is still visible, its 
steep approaches having somewhat the ap- 
pearance of abandoned otter-slides. Nowhere 
in the world, I believe, can such beautiful fo- 
liage be found as that wherewith the forests 
of this wild region bedecks itself in April. 
The young hickory trees spread out marvellous 
leaves, more than a span in width, and the yel- 
low tulip exaggerates both foliage and flowers. 
The dogwood and sour-gum, the red-oak, the 
maple and the chestnut, the cherry, the sasa- 
fras and the lovely sweet-gum all flourish in 
fullest luxury of life and color. Wild flowers, 
too, of almost endless varieties, leap into per- 
fect blossoip early in spring along every hill 
slope and in every valley, pocket, and ravine. 

Not far from Indian Ford stood the Palace 
of Reeds, built by Nature's own hand, on a 
low bluff of the river's east bank. We found 



IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 119 

it — Will and I — while rambling in the valley, 
and, by virtue of the right of discovery, quietly 
appropriated it for our indwelling during the 
fair weather of the delightful Georgian spring. 
Imagine two wild plum trees in full sweet- 
scented bloom standing twenty-five feet apart, 
with a thick-leaved muscadine vine flung over 
them like a richly wrought mantle. The boles 
of the trees are gray and mossy, fluted like 
antique pillars. The ground is flecked with 
rugs of dark Southern moss through which the 
violets and spring beauties have found their 
way. The keen odor of sassafras and the 
delicate perfume of tulip honey comes along 
the air. You stand on the threshold of this 
natural palace, and looking through the 
tender gloom of its arched hall you see the 
cool river flowing and singing on. There are 
bees in the air, wild bees whose home is 
in some great hollow plane-tree not far away. 
You hear the dreamful hum of tiny wings. 
You see the plum flowers shake and let fall 
their golden pollen dust, and the reeds, the 
tall gold-and-green reeds, rise all around the 
palace forming its walls. The earth is warm, 
the sky is pure and cloudless. Deep in the 
brake a hermit-thrush is calling. A vireo be- 
yond the river quavers mournfully. 

The Palace of Reeds was handsomely fur- 
nished with a mossy log for sofa, two camp- 
stools and a low canvas table. An easel stood 
for most of the day in the clear light of the 
west, opening just above the babbling water. 
It is worth noting, because now it is a fra- 
grant memory, that the drawing-board was 
of red cedar. The box of moist water-colors, 
the bird-sketches, the portfolio of pencil notes, 



1 20 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

the half-dozen well worn volumes scattered 
about give a strange air to this woodland 
bower. No farm or plantation is in sight. 
If you can- hear any sound of busy human life, 
it is the singing of some merry negroes pro- 
pelling a corn-boat down the river. Usually 
these boats passed us in the night. They 
were a kind of long, low keel craft with stern 
paddle and oars. Midway of the boat were 
heaped the white sacks of corn. The tall 
dusky oarsmen swayed to and fro singing 
meanwhile some outlandish but strangely fas- 
cinating song. 

Here by the flaring light of burning pine- 
knots we read Keats and Theocritus, Shelley 
and Ovid in turn. Our concurrent studies 
were not plainly congruous, rather conflict- 
ing, one might think, for we studied Greek, 
practised archery, collected birds-eggs, made 
water-color drawings of plants and birds, 
read poetry, boated, swam, practised taxi- 
dermy, fenced with reed foils, fished for bass, 
and cooked admirable dinners ! A little way 
off stood our cabin, or rather, our hut, into 
which a sudden shower of rain now and then 
drove us. When the nights were clear we 
hung our hammocks in the palace, and slept 
suspended in the perfumed breeze. Often I 
awoke in the small hours and heard the rac- 
coons growling and chattering in the brake. 
At such times the swash of the river had a 
strangely soothing effect, a lullaby of fairy 
land. 

Will had a nocturnal habit. He would slip 
forth, when the moon shone, long after I had 
gone to sleep, and the twang of his bowstring 
would startle me from quiet dreams as he let 



' IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 121 

go a shaft at an owl or a night heron. Read- 
ing over some of the notes I made at the time 
recalls the charmingly unique effect of certain 
sounds heard at waking moments in those out- 
door resting-hours : 

The leaping of bass, for instance, plash, 
plash, at unequal intervals of time and distance, 
breaking through the supreme quiet of mid- 
night, comes to one's ears with a liquid, bub- 
bling accompaniment, not at all like anything 
else in the world. The mockingbird {Mimus 
polyglottus) often starts from sleep in the scented 
foliage of the sweet-gum to sing a tender med- 
ley to the rising moon. At such time his 
voice reflects all the richness and shadowy 
dreamfulness of night. It blends into one's 
sense of rest and becomes an element of en- 
joyment after one has fallen again into 
slumber. 

Frogs are night's buffoons. " Croak, croak, 
croak," you hear one muttering, and with your 
eyes yet unopened and the silence and still- 
ness of sleep scarcely gone from you, you 
wonder where he is sitting. On what green 
tussock, with his big eyes jetting out and his 
angular legs akimbo, does he squat ? Sud- 
denly " Chug ! " You know how he leaped 
up, spread out his limbs, turned down his head 
and struck into the water like a shot. You 
chuckle grimly to yourself, turn over in your 
hammock, and all is forgotten. 

Then the screech-owl begins to whine in 
its tremulous, querulous falsetto, snapping its 
beak occasionally as if to remind the mice and 
small birds of its murderous desires. The 
big horned-owl laughs and hoots far away in 
gloomy glens. The leaves rustle, the river 



1 22 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

pours on, and the wind sinks and swells like 
the breath of a mighty sleeper. 

Perfumes, too, affect one strangely, on wak- 
ing, in the depth of night. There is a certain 
decayed wood in the Southern forests which at 
times gives forth a delicate, far-reaching aroma. 
This, together with the occasional wafts of 
sweet-gum odor and the peculiarly sharp smell 
of pine resin, steals through the woodland 
ways and touches the sleeper's senses until 
he slowly awakes. Drowsily he lies, with his 
eyes lightly closed, noting the tender shades 
of sweetness as they come and go. But the 
falling of a slight shower of rain, one of those 
short, light, even down-comings of large drops, 
which is not strong enough to break through 
the leaf-canopy overheard, moves the out-door 
slumberer to most exquisite enjoyment. He 
opens his eyes and all his senses at once. 
The air has sweet moisture in it, the darkness 
is deep. Above, around, far and near, a tu- 
mult is in the leaves. The shower is scarcely 
more than momentary in its duration, but it 
is infinitely suggestive. There are millions of 
voices calling from far and near. Vast organ 
swells, tender aeolian strains, the thrumming 
of harp-strings and the exquisite quaverings of 
the violin. Multitudes clapping hands and 
crying from afar in applause. Then as the 
cloud passes on, the throbbing sounds trail 
after it, and at length it all dies out beyond 
the hills. 

So our nights were " filled with music " in 
the Palace of Reeds. 

Our days were the scenes of greater because 
more active pleasures. We had a pirogue dug 
put of a tulip log which we propelled on the 



JN A PALACE OF REEDS. 123 

river in our shooting, sketching and fishing 
excursions. We endeavored to make pencil 
studies of all the wild-birds in their natural at- 
titudes, drawing them in water-colors after- 
wards from specimens held captive. These 
models we took in springes, traps, and snares 
of various sorts, the horse-hair slip-noose be- 
ing the best for many birds. When the mul- 
berries are ripening you may capture wood- 
peckers readily by erecting a smooth, slender 
pole projecting somewhat above the tree-top 
and having horse-hair slip-nooses, thickly set 
along its sides, for entangling their feet. The 
same capillary arrangement on the branches 
of trees especially haunted by any other bird 
will prove a pretty certain means of ensnar- 
ing it. We took great pains not to hurt our 
captive models and freed them as soon as pos- 
sible. 

Sketching a wild bird in the freedom of the 
woods and brakes is the utmost shorthand 
known to the artist. It must be done with 
all the dash and hurry of phonographic report- 
ing. Five seconds cover a very long stop in a 
bird's movements, and some of them are never 
still for even that short period of time. I have 
followed one bird, a species of warbler {Sylvia 
vermivora,) for a full hour before I could get a 
passable outline sketch. In and out among 
the leaves, over and under and round and 
round, it went flitting, peering, prying, a very 
embodiment of restlessness. Such a chase has 
in it a smack of excitement, and after it is all 
over a leisurely survey of your sketch-book, leaf 
by leaf, will be both amusing and instructive. 
There is something of inspiration often found 
lurking in lines dashed down upon the paper 



1 24 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

in this hurried, ahiiost frantic way. You have 
also sometimes made comic pictures when you 
least intended such things ! Here is a bird's 
bill and a quick firm curve for the back of its 
head ; the rest of the sketch flew away with the 
original. On the next page stands a fly-catcher, 
on one leg, minus a wing and having only the 
hint of a tail ; but you have preserved the 
characteristic attitude, and the sketch is valua- 
ble. You can work it up at your leisure. 
Here is a pine-woodpecker, a pretty fair out- 
line, but there is no sign of an eye in the bird's 
head and its feet grasp thin air. All these 
notes, however hurried and uncertain, are 
reminders of what your eyes have seen, bring- 
ing up at once vivid pictures of the gay wild 
things which have flitted before you. 

Sometimes a bird will be exceedingly ac- 
commodating. I recall now how one day I 
crept, under cover of a tuft of wild sedge grass, 
to within thirty feet of a log-cock {Hylotavius 
pileatus), and worked out a most satisfactory 
study, while it was quietly eating winged ants, 
as they poured from a hole it had pecked in a 
rotten stump. 

The yellow-billed cuckoo is a very difficult 
bird to sketch, so shy and sly and so restless. 
You will hear his queer, throbbing note in 
some lone place, and you will slip along 
hoping to see him. When you have nearly 
reached the spot, lo, he has eluded you, and 
his mournful voice caws out from deeper 
shades farther off among the tangled trees. 
The wood-thrush and hermit-thrush are equally 
evasive. By the way, Wilson claims that 
the hermit-thrush is mute. I am sure this 
is an error. One da}^ while I lay in a cane- 



IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 125 

brake watching a green-heron's nest, a 
low sweet '' turlilee;' much like the wood- 
thrush's warble or thrill, called my eyes to a 
bird not ten feet away from me. I was well 
hidden and motionless, so that I was not dis- 
covered until after I had thoroughly identified 
the hermit. It repeated the low, musical trill 
several times, and when at length I frightened 
it by some movement, it flew away uttering a 
keen squeak or chirp. 

Having digressed thus far it is pardonable 
to go a step further and declare that the blue- 
jay sings. I have heard it sing a low, tender 
wheedling song which seems never to have at- 
tracted the notice of naturaUsts. A wood- 
duck had her nest in the hollow of a plane- 
tree just across the little river from the palace. 
I watched her go out and in. She made her 
wings silent, so as not to attract notice, going 
through the air with as little noise as an owl. 
Her mate, a beautifully painted fellow, lin- 
gered about the brakes in the vicinity, occa- 
sionally uttering a sly quack. How the young 
when hatched were conveyed safely to the 
ground we failed to discover. One morning 
tliey were in the river swimming beside their 
mother as if they had always been there, dod- 
dling their heads and arching their necks just 
like old ducks. 

There was an island a mile up the river 
whither we often went, to fish off shore for 
bass, and to sketch kildee-plover and sand- 
pipers. On one end of the island grew a 
patch of cane and rush-grass into which we 
tracked a fawn ; but the shy creature hid so 
successfully that we could not find it. A wild 
turkey had its nest in the edge of this jungle 



1 26 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

early in the spring. It was also the nesting- 
place of a pair of cardinal-grosbeaks, whose 
well-built home I discovered fitted neatly be- 
tween three strong reeds. Soon in the morn 
ing the male would alight on the highest point 
above the nest and whistle bravely, his plum 
age shining like dull red fire 

There is no craft like a dug-out, that genu- 
ine Indian pirogue, for perfect gentleness and 
sweetness of motion. You sit on a seat hewn 
in the stern and ply a short, rather broad 
paddle. The long, slender boat is all before 
you, the prow well up, like a pug nose. The 
round, smooth bottom slips along almost on top 
of the water, as if running over ice. In such a 
pirogue we would paddle around the island 
and troll for bass, often catching wonderfully 
game fellows of over four pounds in weight. 
This silent gliding of the dug-out makes \l par 
excellence the angler's craft. There is no rat- 
tling of rowlock and thole-pin, no oar-dip. 
Your paddle goes in silently, it comes out with 
not even the slightest ripple-break. The 
bas5 and bream are utterly unaware of your 
movements. 

Speaking of bream, as the Southerners call 
the blue-perch, it is a royal fish. You find 
it in the eddies and swirls of those Georgian 
brooks and rivers, a voracious feeder, taking 
the worm with all the vigor of a trout. You 
use a rather heavy reed for a rod, rigged with 
a small reel. The larvae of wasps and angle- 
worms are the most killing baits. A bream 
weighing ten ounces will give you a lively run, 
testing your skill equal to a speckled trout of a 
like size. It comes out of the water shining 
with royal purple and yellowish waves of color. 



IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 127 

In shape it is shorter and broader, but resem- 
bles somewhat the rock-bass. 

We sketched our fish while alive, and I find, 
among many other curious reminders of the 
palace, a pencil drawing of the great Southern 
gar, a fish with a bill much like a snipe's. 
This specimen we did not catch, but bought it 
of an old negro, who, every Saturday, rain or 
shine, visited our camp, coming from a planta- 
tion quarter some miles up the river. He was 
a piper, a sort of African Pan, who blew lively 
pieces of barbaric tunes out of reed joints 
arranged in triangular form. He came to sell 
us eggs of the guinea fowl, which I suspect he 
stole, albeit they made very fine omelets. He 
taught us a new and ingenious method of 
snaring hares and birds. Our water-color 
sketches were wonderful to his eyes, and he 
babbled about them in a supremely droll way. 
To dwellers in the Northern and Middle 
States, it may seem strange, this out-door life, 
but it must be remembered that the hills and 
valleys of Cherokee Georgia, are dry and 
warm from April to September, dews are light, 
the air pure, and, for weeks together, the sky is 
cloudless day and night. I recall a perfect 
February, it must have been in 1859. Will 
and I, then mere boys, staid out during the en- 
tire month and not a drop of rain fell. Every 
day was warm and clear, the nights were cool 
and pleasant. No clouds, scarcely any wind 
—a month of rare dreamy weather, not unlike 
northern Indian summer. 

Many a night in July and August I have slept 
in the open air under a tree, preferring it to a 
cot or bed indoors. A hammock and a heavy 
blanket, for the nights are chilly even in mid- 



128 BV-JVAVS A ND BIRD- NO TES, 

summer, with mere shelter from dew if any fall, 
are all one needs for healthful rest. 

Our bower among the reeds caught that 
gentle current of air which nearly always flows 
with the way of a river, and we were rarely dis- 
turbed by gnats or mosquitoes. There were 
no dangerous wild beasts, very few poisonous 
snakes, and, of course, nothing else to make 
us fearful. 

But we were not idle dreamers. We had m 
view a definite object, toward which all our 
studies and labors pointed. Alas, the cataclys- 
mal years which soon came swept all away ! 
The best that can be gathered from fragment- 
ary remnants and vivid recollections is a sort 
of dreamy pleasure in somewhat living over 
again those days and nights of tranquil green- 
wood life. A little of science and a great deal 
of nature we found out. We learned the ways 
of the fish, the birds, the bees, the winds, the 
clouds, the flowers. We translated the mean- 
ing of stream-songs and leaf-murmurs. In the 
Palace of Reeds we knew utter freedom based 
on older law than magna charta or any declara- 
tion of rights. When one is a supple boy in the 
wildwood, healthy, happy, strong, with a long 
bow in his hands and old romance all through 
him, he is free as the winds and birds. Add to 
this a strong purpose, an aim far ahead, and 
what would you have more ? 

Our indoor days, if those spent in the Palace 
may be so called, would have appeared, to a 
world-wise onlooker, somewhat tame ; but to 
a poet they would have revealed the labors of 
sincere, earnest souls, feeling their way through 
youth's morning-mist to the clear light. 

I remember one hot May day, too sultry for 



IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 



29 



any great physical exertion, we spent in the 
most delightful way. Will was busy with The- 
ocritus, and kept up a running comment on the 
oral translation to which he was treating me, 
while I, with leisurely care, was making a draw- 
ing in water-colors of a fine butcher-bird I had 
captured the day before. The wind came in 
desultory throbs through our mossy hall, fetch- 
ing up from the river a touch of dampness and 
the smell of water weeds. All the bird-voices 
were hushed, or, if heard at all, they wasted 
themselves in scattering squeaks and lazy 
dreamful flutings. Shut away from the sun, 
we were made aware of his extreme heat indi- 
rectly by the softened reflection from the water 
and by that dusky dryness always observable 
on the reed leaves and the blades of aquatic 
grass when a spring day burns like midsummer. 
We could hear the chattering cry of the king- 
fisher and an occasional plash, as the industri- 
ous bird plunged into the river after his prey. 
Diagonally across the stream, near the other 
bank, a small tree growing at the water's edge, 
had caught a scraggily drift of logs and boughs, 
round which a brown scum, with huge pyra- 
mids of white foam, was clinging. Some green 
herons stood on projecting sticks, stretching 
their puffy necks, or silently sulking, with 
their sharp beaks elevated and their throats 
knotted into balls upon their breasts. Among 
some stones in a shallow place, a bright spot- 
ted water-snake lay in the ripple, holding up 
his angular head and darting his malign tongue 
in sheer wantonness of spirit. 

Those idyls, as Will read them, fell from 
his lips to immediately blend with the warm 
lull, the glowing dream of Nature. Those flow- 
9 



1 30 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

ers of song joined well witn the flower-de-luce 
and the wild geranium. Their racy fragrance 
was of kin to the leaf-smell and resin odor. 
Will's voice seemed, in some mysterious way, 
to become the expression of the mood of Na- 
ture. A dream came upon me. I leaned 
against the wall of reeds and felt the coolness 
of their sappy stalks steal all through my frame. 
My sketch faded from my sight and I but 
vaguely noted the restless movements of my 
captive shrike. 

There are times when hearing a true lyric 
read aloud is the quintessence of all rapture- 
ful music. It is the expression of everything 
ariose and thrillingly sweet which has ever 
been played or written or sung, from Terpan- 
der to Remenyi, from Anacreon to Aldrich. 
I said something of this sort to Will in reply to 
a kindred suggestion from him touching the 
idyls. He arose and strung his bow, then, 
holding his ear close to the cord, he twanged 
it softly and replied : " You hear that low note. 
Well, how many ages ago did man first hear 
it? The piano, the violin, the lyre, every 
stringed instrument is a growth from the long- 
bow. So some poet away off in yesterdays let 
fall the first perfect seed of song, and its kind 
will go on increasing in vigor and multiplying 
in number forever." 

Somewhere, in the depths of the brake, a 
cat-bird began to trill and warble, and a big 
bass leaped above the water of the river, beside 
a half submerged log. The sun crept on and 
rolled down the west. As the shadows length- 
ened the heat withdrew, giving place to re- 
freshing coolness. We watched the little 
flurries of wind rimple the river's face. Great 



IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 131 

turtles came up out of the water and crawled 
along on a sandy place. Two doves circled in 
the air, sailing like sparrow-hawks, getting 
lower and lower, until they lit upon a stone 
in the shallows below us and drank thirstily. 
We heard the woodpeckers pounding in the 
woods behind the hill, the nuthatches crying 
" ank, ank," in the great tulip tree hard by, 
and high overhead, in the yellow glory of sun- 
light, a hen-hawk screaming. Odors arose 
and passed down the waxing wind. The cane 
leaves tipped each other lightly, and a whisper- 
ing of many voices arose from the rushes and 
flags. So twilight thickened into night. The 
stars crept out and the great horned owl and 
the night-hawk crept out, too, with some solemn 
bats and giant moths, that whirled and darted 
above the reeds. 

Such a fortnight in the woods as I have been 
lightly sketching, will bring to him who rightly 
uses it a rich return for whatever sacrifice it 
compels. It is to Nature one must go for 
ideas. Her lessons are rich with original 
germs for the philosopher, the poet, the artist 
or the romancer to vitalize his works withal. 
No genuine bit of originality can be found, in 
poem, picture or tale, which has not been 
drawn from the secret depositories of Nature. 
The woods and streams, the hills and winds 
are but the indices to volumes, one leaf of 
which would exhaust the literature of ages. 
All eloquence, poetry, and painting can be 
better understood when one is as free as the 
wands and as happy as a brook. To know 
what is supreme enjoyment, go into the woods 
and, lying beside a rivulet in fair June weather, 
read Theocritus till the bubbling stream and 



132 BV-TVAVS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

the rhythmic idyls flow together in your mind 
a perfect harmony of naturalness. Or, if you 
are an artist, set up your easel by the brook, 
or, with sketch-book in hand, follow the vireo 
and wood-thrush from spot to spot until you 
have noted something new, if it be but a new 
attitude of the shy, shadowy things. Lie on 
the cool earth and watch the wind wave the 
trees and see the sunlight flit and flash through 
their high tops like rare thoughts through a 
poet's mind. Leap up and shout and sing. 
Take off your hat and toss your hair in the 
breeze. Plunge into the river and dive and 
swim. Go sleep in a hammock in the Palace 
of Reeds ! 



CUCKOO NOTES. 

Taken at the right season, the mountainous 
region of northern Georgia will furnish a prac- 
tically unworked field to the naturalist and 
pedestrian tourist, whilst to the artist it must 
become, sooner or later, a source of rich treas- 
ure. No other part of our country offers so 
pleasing a variety of landscape features, from 
the quiet repose of level river-fed valleys to 
the grandeur of rocky peaks thrown up against 
the bluest sky in the world. 

This region is the Spring haunt of a large 
number of our American birds, as it affords 
the best possible nesting- and feeding-places 
for them, especially those whose habits are in- 
sectivorous and arboreal ; besides, it is in the 
direct line of migration from Florida and other 
southern winter resorts to the great northern 
summer habitat of those happy feathered aris- 
tocrats who can afford to oscillate with the sun. 
The peculiarities of soil, the suddenness with 
which Spring comes on, and the protection to 
tender germs afforded by the curiously moun- 
tain-locked " pockets " and valleys, cause all 
sorts of forest and field vegetation to leap 
into vivid, lusty life early in April. 

There is no word in our language so express- 
ive of the sudden appearance of leaf and 
flower all over those brown hills and slate- 
gray valleys, as gush. The rains practically 
end with March, and the sun ushers in the sue 
ceeding month with a fervor that would be un- 



1 34 BV- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

comfortable but for the ever-fresh breezes ; the 
light vegetable mould of the thin forests warms 
at once, and within a few days everything is 
green with leaves and gay with flowers. Even 
the oak-trees have scarcely time to show their 
tassels before their leaves have broadened to 
dimensions wholly beyond comparison with 
those of oak foliage in any lower or higher lati- 
tude. An almost dazzling vividness flashes, so 
to speak, from valley to hill-top, indicative of 
an exceptional local climatic impulse. Every- 
thing grows with a riant haste, as if aware 
that this ecstatic Spring vigor would soon ex- 
haust itself (as it nearly always does) and 
leave the region to a long, dreamy Summer 
drouth. 

The migratory birds drop into this favored 
district, just in time to get the full benefit of 
its luxuriance, and are met by a clamorous and 
querulous army of residents, whose domain is 
too large to be successfully defended against 
invaders. The wild orchards of plum and 
haw that border the glades, the thickets of 
young pines, the hickory groves and the dusky 
forests of post-oak and black gum are at once 
flooded with song. The semi-marsh lands 
where the liquidamber * flourishes, and the 
river "bottoms" where the tulip-tree and the 
ash and elm grow to giant size, are the haunts 
of the pileated woodpecker, the hermit-thrush, 

* The sweet gum {Liquidamber styraciflua) is a 
beautiful tree growing to perfection in the Southern 
States, along the banks of small streams in wet land. 
The gum or resinous balsam obtained by scarif5'ing the 
bole is of a clear amber color, is pleasing to the taste, 
and gives forth a peculiarly agreeable odor. The tree 
bears a flat oval berry of a dark blue color much sought 
after by the golden-winged woodpecker. 



CUCKOO NOTES. 135 

and many another of the shyest and rarest of 
our birds. 

Nearly all the rivers and rivulets of North 
Georgia are bordered with canebrakes and 
overhanging trees, darkly cumbered and bowed 
with the wildest masses of muscadine vines. 
The canoe-voyager passing down the Oostanau- 
la, the Connasauga, the Coosawattee or the 
Salliquoy — streams as free and unconventional 
as the savages who gave them their musical 
names— will have exceptional opportunities 
for studying nature at first hand. 

It was down these rivers that the rich plant- 
ers, whose isolated plantations were scattered at 
wide intervals along the " bottoms," used to 
despatch their corn and wheat, their oats and 
cotton, in keel-boats manned by the happiest 
slaves who ever sighed for freedom. Many a 
moon-lit night I have lain on my bed of cedar 
boughs on a high, breezy bluff of the Coosa- 
wattee and heard those merry-hearted boatmen 
go by with the current, playing the banjo and 
fluting on the genuine Pan-pipe of graded reed- 
joints."*^ Recalling the music, at this distance, 
it seems to me the most barbaric and withal 
the most fascinating imaginable. Usually, no 
matter how bright the night, they had a fire of 
pine-knots flaring at the boat's prow, near 
which, on the rude floor of the forecastle, they 

* This pipe is, in fact, identical with the Syrinx or 
Pan-pipe of the ancients. I have seen and examined 
many of them, formed of from five to seven reed-joints, 
of graduated sizes, bound together in a row. The 
music is made by blowing the breath into the open ends 
of the Teeds, There were some reed-blowers among 
the slaves of North Georgia who executed certain char- 
acteristic negrq melodies with surprising effect, 



136 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

danced their vigorous hoe-downs, jigs and 
jubah-shuffles. 

The hill country is, for the most part, very 
thinly settled, and many plantations once fer- 
tile and prosperous now lie waste, all over- 
grown with dew-berry vines and persimmon 
thickets. Everywhere, however, the birds find 
rich picking in the season of young leaves and 
larvae, and all those perfumed and flowery 
groves are charming nesting-places. 

Rummaging among my ornithological notes, 
I find enough material touching the habits and 
haunts of our American cuckoos to make a lib- 
eral volume. Most of the memoranda refer 
to North Georgia, and, in fact, the yellow-billed 
cuckoo {Coccygiis americajius) especially, is 
more numerous there than anywhere else that 
I know of. The habits of this bird as well as 
those of the three or four other species found 
in North America, are extremely interesting, 
disconnected from any mere scientific view, 
and the places these birds inhabit, and the 
season during which they may be studied, 
make the pursuit of knowledge touching them 
a most delightful affair indeed. 

The old nursery rhyme : 

" One flew east, one flew west, 
One flew to the Cuckoo's nest," 

should have read : 

" One flew sottth to the cuckoo's nest," 

in order to conform to American facts ; for it 
is below the Cumberland range of mountains 
that one may find the paradise of cuckoos. 
Of course even the yellow-bill comes far North 
and nests in our apple orchards, forewarning 



CUCKOO NOTES. 137 

US of rain, as many good people think, by ut- 
tering its notably strange cry, once heard 
never forgotten ; but yet it is on the northern 
margin of the sub-tropic, among the dry, warm 
hills of Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas, 
that Coccygus most loves to dwell. 

A cuckoo's nest is a very simple affair — at 
first glance, a mere amorphous jumble of 
twigs, catkins and leaf-ribs, apparently tossed 
at hap-hazard on a low bough ; but it will bear 
close study, for its architecture is characteris- 
tic of the bird's strange genius. How does 
such a loose pile of sticks maintain its place 
during a heavy wind? Careful examination 
discloses a system of deftest weaving instead 
of a careless or chance arrangement. The 
work of a genius may appear rough and dis- 
jointed when in fact the subtlest art has made 
it look so for the deepest purpose. We may 
never determine how near is the relation be- 
tween the rarest human intelligence and the 
instinct of animals, but I have not yet seen 
the man who could build a cuckoo's nest ! 

From the Ohio valley down into Florida I 
have tracked the cuckoo through all his sea- 
sons and haunts ; but, as I have already said, 
it was in the hill-country of North Georgia that 
I made the most of my notes. Thither, there- 
fore, let us go in the first days of April and be 
on the ground when the strange, sly, shadow- 
like bird comes up from the farther South. 
He usually comes, with the wind in his favor, 
drifting down into the fragrant groves on that 
half-enervating, half-inspiring dream-breath 
which the Spring puffs over the hills from the 
gulf. The first notice given of his advent is 
that pounding note, dolefully sounded in the 



1 38 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

dusky depths of the woods, hearing which the 
old plantation negroes used to sing their 
watermelon rhymes : 

" Plant yo' milions w'en de rain-crow holler, 
Ef yo' doan dey wont be wo'f er quar' dollar ! , 

Ki fo' de rain, 

Ki fo' de crow. 
Ye orter see how de wa'r milion grow ! " 

It is not so remarkable, after all, that the 
cuckoo is called Rain-crow throughout the en- 
tire area of its habitat, for he seems always 
able to conjure up a shower within a day or 
two of his first appearance in the spring. I 
suspect that he holds his solemn voice until 
the rain is at hand, so as to make a fine artis- 
tic unity out of it and the depressing gloom of 
a rising storm-cloud. 

The haw-groves that usually fringe the mar- 
gin of the mountain glades are the Yellow- 
bill's favorite resorts when it first reaches the 
hill-country from the south. Here it meets 
the blue-jay, the brown-thrush and the cardi- 
nal-grosbeak, permanent residents and im- 
placable claimants of all the fruits and insects 
of these favored spots. 

A glade is a peculiarly Southern woodland 
feature, not found in perfection north of Ten- 
nessee, a miniature prairie, surrounded by 
scrubby trees and groves or thickets of plum 
and haw-bushes, and covered, as a rule, with 
wild wire-grass and tufts of sedge. Every one 
who has spent much time in the wildwoods 
has noted how few are the small birds inhabit- 
ing forests of tall thickly-growing timber ; but 
these glades, set in the midst of immense 
tracts of pine and oak woods, are oases of 



CUCKOO NOTES. ' 139 

bird-life, as one might say, where in the sing- 
ins: season the air is shaken with a sweet tu- 
mult of voices. Here the persevering egg- 
collector is sure to find the delicately-tinted 
treasures with which he delights to decorate 
his cabinet. The butcher-bird, the grosbeak, 
the cat-bird, the wood-thrush, the brown- 
thrush, the robin, the blue-jay, the mocking- 
bird and the cuckoos all like to build their 
nests in the thorny arms of the haw and plum- 
trees. All these birds are, in a degree, bit- 
ter foes of each other, allowing no opportu- 
nity of venting a little spite to go by unim- 
proved, but they rarely go to the length of 
committing any irreparable wrong. True, the 
blue-jay now and then robs a nest and the 
shrike may impale a smaller bird on a thorn, 
but these acts are the rare exceptions in the 
mating and nesting time. 

The cuckoo, however, must be closely 
w^atched by all the rest or it will slip its egg 
into a stranger's nest. Our American bird is 
very sly in performing this parasitic trick, so 
common to the European species, and is 
guilty of a sin in connection therewith which 
adds greatly to the ugliness of the main crime. 
I am led to believe, on the strongest circum- 
stantial evidence, that the yellow-bill species, 
at least, not only carries its egg to the nest of 
another bird, but that it also invariably takes 
away from the nest one of the eggs rightfully 
there. This habit is a very curious and in- 
teresting one. Our cuckoo always builds a 
nest of its own and rears its brood with ex- 
emplary care. The eggs it scatters on occa- 
sion here and there in strange nests are prob- 
ably the result of over- fecundity, for at best 



I40 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

it appears to be erratic in its laying, the eggs 
in its own nest varying greatly in number and 
in development stage. 

I have collected and arranged all the ob- 
tainable facts on this subject, and my conclu- 
sions in short are : That the cuckoo of North 
America, more especially the Yellow-bill, may 
be either slowly losing or slowly gaining the 
egg-depositing or parasitic habit of the Old- 
World species ; that it is exceedingly eccen- 
tric, in connection with this habit, acting from 
the impulse of accidental necessity on account 
of an irregular fecundity. Its nest-building 
habit will not admit of its rearing a large 
brood of young ; its eggs must, therefore, be 
divided among the nests of its neighbors : 
that is, whenever the over-supply comes on. 
The bird itself, as regards the two species 
(black-billed and yellow-billed) with which I am 
well acquainted, is very strangely sly, furtive, 
and erratic in all its actions, affecting a close 
observer with the impression that it is all the 
time laboring under some restrictions or lim- 
itations not common to birds in general. Its 
movements are graceful, but there is in them 
something that suggests unsubstantiality — the 
lightness that comes of an ill-balanced nature. 

Its form is elongated and so accentuated 
by its slender, curving bill and disproportion- 
ally developed tail, that it appears almost 
serpent-like at times, as it creeps with a noise- 
less gliding motion through the foliage. 
There is never any evidence of happiness in 
its actions or in the sound of its voice. On 
the contrary, the cuckoo appears to be the 
embodiment of aimlessness, restlessness, and 
unmeaning discontent. Its solemn, almost 



CUCKOO NOTES. 141 

gloomy, hazel eyes, and the peculiar way it 
has of glaring half-stupidly at one when one 
approaches it, adds much to this unbalanced 
effect. In flying from one tree to another it 
does not cut straight away through the air, 
but dives downward, nearly to the ground, 
sometimes, and then whirls along in a zig-zag, 
erratic line, rising again at a sharp angle be- 
fore alighting. While in the air there is a 
sparkle of white in its over-long tail, and a 
sheen of greenish silver-gray along its neck 
and back, while on its wings trembles the 
glint of burnished copper blended with red- 
dish cinnamon tints. 

While in repose it may be described as fol- 
lows : Bill black above, yellow below, long, 
broad at base, gently curved ; feet lead-col- 
ored ; back, darkish olive-gray ; under parts, 
white ; wings shot with vivid cinnamon, espe- 
cially on inner webs of quills ; tail bearing 
on central feathers a continuation of the color 
of the back ; outer tail-feathers tipped and 
edged with clear, pure white. Total length, 
1 1.50 inches; alar extent, 16.00 inches. 

Its nest when built in an orchard differs in 
construction somewhat from its wildwood 
architecture ; but it may be easily identified 
by the open, sketchy effect of its outlines, its 
flatness and shallowness and the presence in 
its texture of the tassels and spikes of amen- 
taceous trees carelessly woven through the 
tangle of coarse twigs and fragments of leaves. 
The eggs, deposited irregularly in the oval, 
saucer-like cup, are of a very delicate greenish 
shade of color not easy to describe. I have 
found occasionally as many as seven in a nest, 
though four is the usual number. 



142 BV-IVAVS A ND BIRD-NO TES. 

Our cuckoo is not an " egg-sucker," so far 
as my observation goes. The popular tradi- 
tion giving him that villanous habit, has 
arisen, no doubt, from the fact that he has 
been seen with an egg in his mouth. I can 
think of no wildwood effect more likely to 
gain a lasting lodgment in one's memory than 
the appearance of this bird flying along virith 
an Q:gg between its mandibles, seeking some 
other bird's nest in which to safely lodge this 
surplus fruit of an erratic habit. 

The Black-billed species (C erythrophthal- 
mus) is a little smaller than the Yellow-bill, 
and far less singularly interesting. It lacks 
the white sparkle in the tail and the bright 
reddish copper wing-glint, as well as the dash 
of yellow on the lower mandible ; otherwise it 
is much the same in appearance with C. ameri- 
caiius. 

I once had a bush-tent built of fragrant 
pine and cedar boughs at the margin of a 
glade, not far from the bank of the Coosa- 
wattee, where I spent a fortnight in the sys- 
tematic study of the yellow-billed cuckoo, the 
lesser shrike, the mocking-bird and the cat- 
bir(j. This period extended from about the 
lotb to the 25th of April. All around the 
glade grew honey-locust trees, haw-bushes, 
crab-apple and wild-plum thickets and dense 
tangles of blackberry vines. Everything was 
heavy with leaf and bloom ; fragrance loaded 
the air, and the birds all appeared in a great 
hurry to build. I could sit in my tent door 
during the dewy morning hour and watch the 
love-passages, the quarrels, the fights, the nest- 
ing troubles and triumphs of these gay things 



CUCKOO NOTES. 143 

with not a waft from the busy human world to 
disturb my enjoyment. 

A pair of yellow-billed cuckoos w^ere build- 
ing a nest, after their desultory, aimless fash- 
ion, in a scrubby tree over which a mass of 
the Southern green-briar vines had grown. 
The bough upon which the beginnings of the 
nest-skeleton appeared, was not more than 
forty feet distant from my door, so that, bar- 
ring some slender intervening twigs, I had a 
clear view of all the building processes. Orie 
curious and noteworthy habit of the cuckoo 
was observed, of wdiich I have never seen 
mention in any ornithological work. In carry- 
ing a limber twig or leaf-fragment, the bird 
gripped one end of it with its foot and the 
other with its bill ; a trick which enabled it to 
pass through the tangled vines and branches 
without much difftculty on account of its bur- 
den. 

During my stay at this glade the nights were 
rendered glorious by a strong moon and a 
clear atmosphere. Several times I heard, be- 
tween midnight and dawn, the cry of the 
Yellow-bill uttered in a suppressed tone from 
the densest part of a thicket. It may have 
been a mocking-bird. I tried in vain to be 
sure, but I am inclined to think that the cuckoo 
itself uttered the calls. If it was a mocking- 
bird the weird reserve-force apparent in the 
expression and timbre of the imitative passage 
did infinite credit to the famous low-country 
songster's incomparable vocal powers. 

It is strangely difficult to make out the exact 
location of a bird by its cry at night, especially 
in a wooded place. I tried to discover the 
roosting-place of my cuckoos ; but watch them 



1 44 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

closely as I could, they evaded me. They ap- 
peared not to care much for each other's 
company, save when in a loving mood, and I 
think they roosted without any reference to 
companionship. Early in the morning, how- 
ever, the pair found each other- out, and joined 
in the labor of nest-building or the pursuit of 
caterpillars and other leaf-eating insect forms, 
with a reasonable show of conjugal unity of 
purpose. 

Their nest progressed very slowly and 
jerkily. Now and again, for two or three days 
together, nothing was done to it, then for two 
or three hours the work would be unceasing. 
They behaved themselves after the manner 
of awkward and not very apt tyros in the art. 
The male was even silly in some of his per- 
formances, time and again carrying away from 
the nest a stick (that had previously been 
worked into it with great labor and care), 
apparently in a fit of absent-mindedness. 

This unaccountable listlessness or charac- 
teristic oddity of behavior is not confined to 
the genus now under consideration, but runs 
like a family taint through the whole catalogue 
of cuculidce. The ground-cuckoo {Geococcyx 
californianus) is an embodiment of drollness 
and absurdity. The Ani {Crotophaga ani) 
is another very interesting kinsman of our bird ; 
but instead of scattering its eggs among the 
nests of other families it has the opposite 
habit, several females laying their eggs and 
together incubating them in the same nest ! 

The Cuculus ca?ionis of Linnaeus, which is 
the cuckow or cuckoo of England and Africa, 
has attracted more attention than any other 
bird in the world. Some very strange facts 



CUCKOO NOTES. 145 

touching its history have been gathered. It 
would indeed fill quite a volume if one should 
give only a compendium of cuckoo literature, 
most of which refers to the European bird. 
Quite a discussion was precipitated into scien- 
tific circles when, some thirty years or more 
ago, a distinguished gentleman propounded 
the statement that a cuckoo invariably colored 
her ^gg to coincide with those in the nest 
chosen as the place of deposit. A cabinet of 
eggs, claimed to be those of the cuckoo and 
those of the birds in whose nests they had 
been found, was arranged for the purpose of 
demonstrating the apparent truth of the start- 
ling theory ; but notwithstanding many curi- 
ous facts, it could not be maintained. 

It remains pretty well settled, however, that 
the eggs of Cuculus canorus may now and 
then vary in color, somewhat in accordance 
with the hereditary individuality of the partic- 
ular bird, and that each female cuckoo may 
instinctively choose, as a rule, to deposit her 
Qgg in a nest with those of a bird laying eggs 
of nearly or quite the same color. 

So eccentric and variable is the Yellow-bill 
in its habits, that it is not at all wonderful 
that much doubt has existed as to whether it 
is parasitic ; but I am convinced that it does, 
irregularly, under stress of over-fecundity, slip 
an ^gg occasionally into the nest of another 
bird, and this habit and others characteristic 
of the genus, appear to be imperfectly formed 
as yet, or else they are being gradually aban- 
doned. 

This apparent tendency towards sloughing 
hereditary habits, or acquiring new ones, is 
noticeable in several of our American birds, 



146 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

notably in some species of woodpecker , but 
our cuckoos are the best instances for study. 
A good binocular glass and a season or two 
of patient observation will enable any intelli- 
gent person to detect a great deal of evidence 
of this tendency in cuckoos. The yellow- 
billed species carries its vacillating . nature 
on its sleeve, as it were, and forces it upon 
consideration. The black-billed species is 
scarcely less peculiar at most points ; if there 
is a difference it is ot degree only. Even the 
ground cuckoo {Geococcyx californianus)^ is 
almost absurdly peculiar and outre in its 
habits. Dr. Coues says : " They are singular 
birds — cuckoos compounded of a chicken and 
a magpie ! They prefer running on the ground 
to flying, only using their wings as auxiliary 
* outriggers ' while darting along at almost 
race-horse speed." Dr. Coues notes in the 
nest of this species the same slightness and 
apparent awkwardness of construction so 
marked in all cuckoo nests, " As if," he says, 
" the birds were just learning how to build." 

Our Yellow-bill may be taken as the strong- 
est type of this strange family. Haunting our 
bloom-burdened and odorous Spring groves, 
like some restless spirit of remorse, furtively, 
dreamily, but ever with a look of suppressed 
pain, it has affected the popular mind as if 
with a superstition borne upon its own wings 
from some undiscovered country. Its voice 
is considered ominous not only of rain and 
storm, but of evil in all its mysterious and 
undefined forms. Of course this is an idle 
popular delusion ; but it serves to point out 
the exceedingly well-defined power resident 



CUCKOO NOTES. HI 

in any form of mystery, even if but the qicasi- 
mystery of a cuckoo's ways ! 

Indeed, the bird, its habits, its individuality 
and eccentricity of nesting and of oviposition, 
and its half-mystified expression of the eye, its 
hesitating, skulking flight, and its evident 
lapses into absent-mindedness, may well serve 
to impress one's imagination, at least, with a 
suggestion of a transition state through which 
Cuckoo is passing to a lower or higher grade 
of character. 

One day, as I was going down the Salliquoy, 
a small tributary of the Coosawattee River, I 
saw from my pirogue a cuckoo's nest on a low 
branch of a water-oak. The female was 
crouching on the insecure looking pile of 
sticks in utter terror, while a whole pack of 
blue-jays were screeching and fluttering in the 
foliage above it. I shall not soon forget the 
expression of that bird's great solemn eyes. 
Evidently the poor thing felt that a dreadful 
fate was impending over it. But the fact was 
that the blue-jays were worrying a little 
screech-owl that had ventured into the day- 
light, and which was now cowering in its 
stolid way on another branch of the tree near 
the nest. 

Our Cuckoo, though not notably combative, 
will fight with great fury in defence of its 
young, and the males engage in fierce silent 
struggles for supremacy during the early part 
of the mating season. 

The nesting area of the Yellow-bill extends 
from Florida to Michigan, and from the Atlan- 
tic coast to some line west of the Mississippi 
River, and I am inclined to regard the black- 
billed species as having nearly the same limits 



1 48 BY- WA YS AND BIRD- NO TES. 

of habitat. To what distance Canada is in- 
vaded by either or both seems left in some 
doubt. 

Whilst the cuckoos of eastern North Amer- 
ica are technically frugiverous, they are not, 
so far as my observation serves me, strictly 
fruit-eating within the general and popular 
meaning of the term. I have never seen 
either of the two common species taste any of 
the small fruits, wild or tame. They probably 
eat seeds at need, but their chief food is in- 
sects — the caterpillars, moths, butterfly-eggs 
and various larvae found on the leaves and 
branches of trees. 

The Cuckoo's habits may be studied to 
advantage by any one who will take the trouble 
to scan with care almost any apple-orchard in 
Spring and be guided to the bird by that half- 
solemn, half-comical cry uttered at intervals, 
which may be phonetically rendered thus : 
" Kaiiwk, kaiiwk, kauwk kuk — k7ik — kuk — kuk 
— k—k — k — k, kaiiwk, kauivk, kaiiwk !'' In 
uttering this singular call or cry, the bird be- 
gins slowly, the two or three leading notes 
coming forth at nearly equal intervals, then 
the succeeding ones are produced with rapidly 
increasing quickness, until they run together 
into a sort of rattling noise, succeeded by a 
repetition of the opening cries. Loud, harsh, 
peculiarly doleful, the voice of the rain-crow, 
as the bird is vulgarly called, rings through 
our woods and orchards, more especially in 
cloudy weather, with an accent far from cheer- 
ing or pleasing. Hence has arisen the unwar- 
ranted ill-feeling existing in rural districts 
against this very best bird-friend known to our 
farmers and fruit-growers. The cuckoos 



CUCKOO NOTES. 149 

should be protected and their propagation en- 
couraged, as they are the saviours of our for- 
ests, our orchards, and our hedges. 

Looking over my cuckoo-notes, I find re- 
minders in them of all the sweetest woodland 
solitudes between the Great Lakes and the 
Gulf. The bubbling of the cold trout-brooks 
of the Leelenaw blends with the lazy swash of 
the Pearl River and the Kissimmee. 

But I must hasten to remark that, contrary to 
what one is led to expect, in all the low country 
of the South the cuckoos are scarce, even in 
mid-winter. In the region of Lake Okeechobee 
and on the outskirt of the Everglades close ob- 
servation failed to certainly note even the spe- 
cies C. seniculus or mangrove-cuckoo. From 
the fact that the Yellow-bill is found on the 
Pacific coast and in parts of the Southern 
Rocky Mountains, it is probable that its winter 
resort may be chiefly in Mexico and Central 
America. In March I saw a few specimens 
haunting the oak groves on the high-lands be- 
tween Tallahassee, Florida, and Thomasville, 
Georgia, and I was told that their nests were 
sometimes seen there. 

So many cuckoo legends have gone afloat 
— each adding something uncanny or roman- 
tic to the popular opinion of our harmless bird 
— that I am tempted to close this paper with 
one current in the southern mountainous region, 
to the effect that the Yellow-bill cannot be killed 
by a rifle-shot if its breast be turned towards 
the shooter. I once attempted to demon- 
strate the fallacy of this claim for the benefit 
of a hard-headed old mountaineer and was un- 
lucky enough to miss my bird ! 

" Ther' ! " he exclaimed, " what'd I tell ye ! 



1 50 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

ye mought es well shoot at a ghost, er a 
spirit." 

The secret of the matter is that the cuckoo's 
breast is sheeny white andpresentsa very slen- 
der mark, which on account of its being just 
the color of the silver fore-sight of the com- 
mon rifle, is very difficult to " draw a bead ' 
upon ; wherefore even the most expert marks- 
man is apt to miss it. 



SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 

Our interest in wild song-birds must in- 
crease apace with the narrowing of our wooded 
areas, and in proportion to the constant lessen- 
ing of our opportunities for ornithological 
study at first hand. As our thrushes and 
orioles and warblers one by one take flight, 
we suddenly, in realizing our loss, feel in a 
new way the sweetness of their voices. When 
we were children, even if we lived in the heart 
of the city, we often had glimpses of the 
country with its great dense woods and its 
green fields, its orchards, and its cottages 
covered with morning-glory vines. In those 
days the brown-thrush, the cat-bird, and the 
cardinal grosbeak, sang in every thicket and 
throughout every orchard. Now these charm- 
ing little lyrists are gone from many a former 
haunt ; indeed there are wide areas of country, 
where they used to nest and sing, in which 
they never will be seen in a wild state again. 

Not long since I returned, after twenty 
years' absence, to a neighborhood in which 
my infancy was spent. I remembered a cer- 
tain brook in a little field, a crooked lazy little 
stream bordered with yellow willows and water 
hazel, where the cat-bird loved to swing and 
sing in shade and sun. It was with an inde- 
scribable regret that I found the willows and 
hazel all gone and the brook, sunken under 
ground, groping its way through tubular tiles. 
Where wide woods of beech and sugar-trees 



152 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

used to be, fields of wheat and corn lay green 
and smooth almost to the horizon's rim. What 
a loss the absent birds were felt to be ! In 
fact, when, after much plaintive sauntering 
over the altered grounds, I chanced to hear a 
lonely purple finch twittering in a hedge of 
bois if arc, I felt a thrill of delight which was 
like an electric message from my childhood's 
days. In the streets of the village which had 
shrunken, as if in some mysterious proportion 
to the widening of the surrounding plains of 
agricultural thrift, foraged a well-fed flock of 
detestable English sparrows. This, I thought, 
is advanced enlightenment — a covered ditch 
for a brook, a prim hedge in lieu of a wild 
•plum thicket, an orchard displacing an odor- 
ous grove of wild crab-apple and these pests 
of sparrows usurping the homes of the cardi- 
nal-bird and the thrushes ! 

From almost any little country town, even 
in the West, one must now, as a rule, make a 
long flight into the most neglected nooks of 
the rural neighborhoods, before one can find 
the haunts of the more interesting songsters. 
The elect few of the feathered choir, like the 
choice spirits of the outer circle of young 
poets, are fond of utter, limitless freedom ; 
they do not relish the fragrance, however 
sweet, of over-cultured gardens and bowers. 
True enough, the blue-bird warbles very con- 
tentedly on the best kept fence-row as he 
watches the ploughman turn up the tid-bits from 
the furrow ; and it is an almost savage ten- 
derness that quavers from his throat as he 
pounces upon the dislodged worm, his wings 
gleaming like some precious, doubly purified 



SOAfE MINOR SONG-BIRDS. i 53 

gems fresh from the fabled fires of the em- 
pyrean. " 

Reading the above sentence over, I feel its 
coarseness in the presence of a genuine blue- 
bird-sheen and blue-bird-warble reaching me 
as I write. How artificial and insincere are 
the verbal rhapsodies of the most natural of 
our poets when set in the searching light of 
unconscious nature ! Why do not the blue- 
bird's notes, arranged always in the same 
order and expressed always with precisely the 
same tone, accent, and emphasis, become 
stale } Why does not the bird's manner grow 
perfunctory ? Who ever did get weary of hear- 
ing over and over, from day to day, spring 
after spring, those liquid bird-phrases that, 
pitched to a strange minor, have been the 
same since first an oscine throat was filled 
with music ? We must all, even the most un- 
imaginative of us, acknowledge a little impulse 
to gush and get rid of a fine fury of sentiment 
about the time when a flash of green, a thrill 
of warmth and balm, and a gush of bird-song 
go across the fields and woods. 

The man who can look into a bird's nest, 
well-set with tender-hued eggs, without feeling 
an inward smile, as if his soul were sweetly 
pleased, has lost something that is the chief 
ingredient of perfect sanity and simplicity. 
What is usually meant by the word sentiment- 
ality is an abomination; but our human na- 
ture, in a state of absolute health, is furnished 
with a myriad little well-springs of generous 
sympathy and sweet responsiveness, that 
should not be allowed to go dry. If the fra- 
grant, essential elements of a healthy soul 
may be called sentiments, then let sentiment- 



1 54 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

ality bubble like brooks in spring and gush 
like the thrush's song in nesting time. 

Bird-hunting and bird-loving folk get the 
very best out of life in the way of sensuous 
pleasures not in the least voluptuous or over- 
stimulating. Just now, looking back over my 
notes, observations and recollections of out- 
door life, my long association with most of our 
minor song-birds appears something well worth 
having experienced. Much of what I remem- 
ber is knowledge of a kind scarcely communi- 
cable by any literary or artistic means, or by 
any method of natural expression. Once I 
heard a blue-jay sing as sweetly as the mock- 
ing-bird when trilling in a tender minor key. 
I could hardly believe my own sight and hear- 
ing as the beautiful, tricksy creature sat before 
me with drooping crest and half-raised wings, 
swaying his body lightly up and down and 
uttering a low, almost bewildering flute medley, 
full of the cadences of dreams. 

Still the blue-jay is not reckoned among the 
singing birds by those who are not close ob- 
servers. His common notes, though occasion- 
ally musical and sweet, are, as a rule, harsh 
and ill-tempered ; a very imaginative person 
might conclude that the dolefully tender song 
I heard was the result of a fit of remorse, on 
the blue-jay's part, for myriads of sins com- 
mitted against the nests, the eggs, and the 
young of other and weaker birds. How often 
I have witnessed acts of the most brutal cruelty 
done by the jay in apparently the quietest 
mood imaginable ! 

I recall an instance now : A sparrow had a 
nest with young in a clump of lilac-bushes on 
a lawn in front of a room I was occupying. 



SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 155 

One morning about sunrise, as I sat by a 
window, writing, I heard the mother-bird 
" chipping " dolefully, and I looked out just 
in time to see a blue-jay kill, by a deft turn 
of its powerful bill, the last remaining fledgling 
of the brood. The assassin then proceeded 
to tear up the tiny nest, after which he very 
perfunctorily flew away ! Here was a case of 
utter depravity — a piece of unmitigated out- 
rage for which there could have been no mo- 
tive aside from the impulse of a viciousness 
incomparable. I went to the spot, and found 
the young sparrows scattered on the ground, 
dead in the midst of the shreds of the nest. 
Each bird bore the livid pincer-like impres- 
sion of the jay's beak. I cannot account for 
this well-knownbrutality of the jay ; it does not 
appear to be always present with it, for I have 
known it to live in perfect peace with other birds, 
nesting in the same orchard and even in the 
same tree. Its colors and its restless activity 
make the blue-jay one of the most valuable 
elements of almost every bit of thicket or 
hedge throughout our Middle and Southern 
States for nearly the whole year. 

I am aware that many objections may be 
urged to putting so harsh a screecher in the 
catalogue of music-making birds; but it can 
and does occasionally sing most superbly. 
Moreover, upon being dissected, the blue-jay's 
throat shows a very high state of development, 
the muscular arrangement of the lower larynx 
bearing every sign of great flexibility and of 
delicate adjustment. It is a hardy bird, often 
met with in midwinter far north of the fortieth 
degree of latitude, apparently quite happy 
among the sleety and snowy branches of the 



T 56 BY- WA YS A. YD BIRD-NO TES. 

leafless trees. It is a good nest-builder, and 
provides for its young with a great show of 
affection and industry It customarily keeps 
near the ground, but I have observed large 
flocks high up in the air, migrating southward 
in autumn. 

Turning from a provokingly dual subject — 
the paradoxical nature of our jay — one feels 
relieved in speaking of the genial and melodi- 
ous life of the brown-thrush. Next to the 
mocking-bird the most famous singer of our 
woods, this beautiful little fellow, with his 
snuff-colored coat and dappled vest, is welcome 
wherever he goes. My observations of his 
habits extend over a wide area reaching from 
Northern Indiana to Florida, and I have no 
vicious trait of his character to record. In 
the mountains of East Tennessee, and among 
the hills of North Carolina and Georgia, 
brown-thrushes are almost as common as are 
blackbirds in the flat fields of Illinois. The 
thickets that rim the glades, especially the wild 
orchards of haw and crab-apple, plum and 
honey-locust, are the favorite nesting-places 
of this bird ; but he chooses the topmost tuft 
of the tallest tree for his perch while singing. 
His song, full-toned, loud, clear, varied, is 
often mistaken by casual listeners for that of 
the mocking-bird, though really far inferior to 
it in both volume and compass, and scarcely 
to be compared with it in purity of resonance. 
In the far South, where all birds are given to 
greater latitude of habit than in the North, the 
brown-thrush now and then sings in the night, 
a low, dreamy, lulling song, warbled as if with 
a sleepy throat. In this too he follows, but 
does not equal, the mocking-bird. I have 



SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 157 

habitually slept in a hammock while outing in 
the Southern woods, and no words can convey 
the singularly delicious sense of calm and 
quiet luxury which comes of hearing, far in the 
solemn night, the low, liquid, drowsy nocturne 
of one or both of these charming musicians ! 

The brown-thrush has not had his full meed 
of praise from our poets. As a conventional 
figure, the nightingale — a bird quite unknown 
to Americans — has retained its place on the 
palette of our word-painters, much to the hurt 
of our poetry. In fact, I fancy I can go 
through American poetry and point out every 
passage wherein an author has alluded to a 
bird that he has never seen. How can any one 
describe the fragrance of sweet-clover without 
having it in his nostrils at the moment of writ- 
ing ? How can I write sincerely about the song 
of the brown-thrush or the cat-bird, if I have 
not the stimulus of that song in my brain ? 

In the far-reaching tangles of wild grape- 
vines, found here and there in the beautiful 
little valleys of North Georgia, the brown- 
thrushes sing to the perfection of their powers 
from the early days of April until the first of 
June ; that is, they make the vine-masses their 
home, and do their melodious gushing on the 
very topmost boughs of the highest trees. 
This is not over-statement ; it is one of the 
most striking sights of the Southern woods to 
see a brown-thrush at about sunrise, sitting on 
the apex of the cone-shaped top of a giant 
pine-tree, whilst its song falls in a shower of 
fragmentary and ecstatic trills and quavers 
over all the surrounding woods. This per- 
formance often extends over the space of an 
hour or more, with but slight intermissions. 



1 58 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

The nest of the brown-thrush is a straggling 
mass of twigs, roots, bark, leaves, and weed- 
stems, carelessly tumbled into a. crotch near 
the ground, or on the flat projection of a fence- 
rail, sometimes even on the ground. Its eggs 
are delicately pretty, whitish or pale green, 
flecked thickly with brown, from four to six 
in number. 

North of the Cumberland Range of Mount- 
ains, the brown-thrush is migratory ; but in 
parts of Tennessee and North Georgia I have 
found it a permanent resident, especially in 
the brushy valleys. It is a hardier bird than 
the mocking-bird. 

The cat-bird (what a name !) is one of the 
finest singers in the world — beautiful, too; 
but, for some mysterious reason, under a ban 
of disgrace and contempt throughout its wide 
habitat. You may know him by his dark 
slate-colored coat and gray vest, his black cap 
and chestnut-brown under tail-coverts, as well 
as by his peculiar cat-like mew when irritated. 
He is a lyrist of the dense thickets and brier 
tangles, the musical deity of our blackberry 
jungles and bois d^arc hedges. His song re- 
sembles that of the brown-thrush, but it is 
slenderer and keener, trickling through the 
leaves in a tenuous stream with ripples as 
light as air. 

The nest of this species is well constructed, 
hung low, and its eggs are of a lovely deep 
greenish blue. 

The cardinal-grosbeak is one of our Ameri- 
can songsters, which, though much persecuted 
by fanciers and imprisoned in cages, is not 
justly appreciated. His brilliant red plumage 
and smart manners have been much better 



SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 159 

studied than his sweet and powerful vocaliza- 
tion. His notes are few, but the compass and 
volume of his voice, and the vivid force of ex- 
pression he commands, are without rival. 
Not even the mocking-bird can equal him in 
his one circle of execution. He sings with 
true American energy, flinging out his notes 
as if from a clarion. His attitudes are those 
of unbounded self-confidence ; he appears to 
claim the whole world as his own, as he stands 
bolt upright on a bough, his crest erect, his 
bold eyes flashing, and his voice leaping out 
with the impulse of a diminutive steam-whistle. 
He is a wary, shy, swift bird, but his color ex- 
poses him to the watchful collector, who is 
ever eager to take him. The cardinal's nest 
is well-built, usually set in a tangled place of 
a thicket. Its eggs are of a mottled reddish- 
brown color. 

In the region of Tallulah Falls I met with 
an old man whose chief business was snaring 
red-birds (cardinals) for the sake of their skins, 
which he sold to a New York firm for use in 
millinery decorations. Most of his work was 
done in the mating season, when with a trained 
decoy-bird and a cage furnished with side- 
springes, he took great numbers. The method 
was to hang the cage, of open wire-work, with 
a live male bird in it, on a bough in the midst 
of a thicket. The springes at the sides of the 
cage were so arranged that no sooner did a 
visiting bird alight thereon than he was caught. 
The captive left alone calls loudly and is an- 
swered by a female who comes near. This 
excites the jealousy of her lord, who dashes at 
the cage and dies. The old man had four of 
these murderous contrivances, and was reaping 



i6o BV- WA YS AND BtRD-NO TES. 

a considerable profit from them. He under- 
stood his business perfectly, going about it 
with great energy, but evincing no enthusiasm 
or especial feeling of any kind. 

In the thickly settled States of the West the 
orchards and hedges are, in spring-time, the 
abodes of many singing birds. The field-spar- 
row is chief among these, showing off his ex- 
quisite vocal gifts about the time that the 
young wheat is ankle high. His life is mostly 
spent on the ground where he runs through 
thick grass or cereal sward with a rapidity like 
that of the ousel in water. When the lyrical 
mood comes on he mounts to the top of a 
stump, a hedge or a fence, and pours forth a very 
sweet little carol, meantime elevating his head 
to the full extent of his neck, and pulhng out his 
little throat after the manner of a toad. 

The orioles and some of the warblers have 
cheerful voices, but can scarcely be called fine 
singers. They give a dash of freshness to our 
groves when they arrive early from the South, 
and, like our blue-bird, are always welcome. 

Speaking of the blue-bird, he is uniquely 
American. He has no kin on the other con- 
tinents. He appears to be a flake of the ce- 
rulean above, let fall, by a special dispensa- 
tion, upon our favored country. Like some 
poets, he is always just about to sing, but never 
does more than begin his song. His frag- 
ments are divine, however, suggesting a reserve 
of somethinor too sweet and fine for the com- 
mon winds to bear. His is a rhythmical na- 
ture, and his flight is a poem in itself. As he 
goes trembling and wavering along through 
the air and sunshine, he adds to a May-day 
just the touch that makes it perfect. The 



SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. i6i 

blue-bird in its nest-habit offers for our study 
one of those curious contradictions now and 
then appearing in nature. Instead of building 
a graceful nest, swung airily amid the fragrant 
foliage, it dives into some gloomy, unsightly 
hole in a rotten stump or tree, and there, like 
the kingfisher in his subterraneous cavern, 
rears its brood. Querulous, saucy, bold, this 
beautiful little creature has endeared itself to 
every observer. 

Our indigo-bird, bluer than the last-named 
singer, and almost as common, has attracted 
comparatively little attention. Its song is 
really fine, though delivered without expres- 
sion, or any show of interest. One must ap- 
proach very close to get the full sweetness of 
the frail, faltering strain which can be heard 
but a little distance. When it is caught in its 
completeness, however, the melody is so child- 
ish and tender that one forgives the inartistic 
manner of the delivery. The scientific name 
of this bird is Passerina cyafiea, the specific 
part meaning dark-blue, and it may be identi- 
fied easily by that color covering its head and 
shimmering with a greenish gleam over its 
back. Its nest is rather sketchy, built with 
little care, and set in a low bush, usually at a 
crotch. Its eggs are bluish white, sometimes 
slightly freckled. 

With a word about Wilson's thrush I must 
close this paper. To my ear this bird's voice 
is purer and richer than that of the famous 
wood-thrush. Its shy habits, and the chary 
parsimony with which it doles out its vocal 
favors, have, no doubt, tended to prevent its 
becoming popular, even with good observers. 
There is a silvery ring in its higher notes and 
II 



1 62 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

a watery gurgle in its lower ones, that give to 
its song, usually heard in low, heavily wooded, 
dusky semi-swamps, a peculiar vibration alto- 
gether indescribable. Its nest is a curious 
mixture of sticks, leaves, grasses, and rootlets, 
usually set on or near the ground. Its eggs 
are greenish blue. Of all the thrushes this 
appears to me to be the shyest and wildest, 
and while its voice lacks that flexibility and 
compass possessed by those of the brown- 
thrush and the cat-bird, it certainly has the 
advantage at the point of timbre and of liquid- 
ity. One can imagine nothing to compare 
with some of its notes, unless it would be the 
blending of the tones of a silver bell with the 
bubbling of a brook over pebbles. Its song is 
usually heard at a considerable distance, in 
the twilight gloom of damp woods, and there 
is a touching trace of melancholy in it that 
makes it blend well with the environment. 
Along the Wabash river, in the broad, wooded 
" bottoms," I have heard it singing long after 
sunset, and its voice is the first sound that 
breaks the silence of the morning there. 

One who has loved the woods and fields and 
has spent much time in the pursuit of knowl- 
edge in the wild paths of nature, can look back 
upon the days that are gone and see so many 
bright visions — hear so many sweet sounds 
and feel so many thrills through the nerves of 
memory ! One can scarcely be called senti- 
mental if one gushes a little over one's sweet 
experiences. 

The next best thing to having cheerful and 
healthful memories is the liberty of imparting 
something of their effect to others ; and I do 
not envy the man whose heart does not some- 



SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 163 

times quiver in unison with the bird-songs of 
spring. The science of ornithology is very 
fascinating and useful, but the unrecognized 
and unnamed science of bird-loving is to the 
more practical study what religion is to bi- 
ology — the explanation of the unexplainable. 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 

One day, when I was a little boy, I climbed 
up the face of a rugged cliff, on a mountain- 
side in North Georgia, to get some richly- 
colored lichens growing there. While I was 
clinging desperately to a weather-soiled pro- 
jection, I chanced to see, in a small cleft near 
my fingers, a gaping red-and-yellow mouth. A 
chill like death swept over me and I came 
near falling to certain destruction. Of course 
I was well acquainted with all the snakes of 
the region ; what mountain-lad was not ? — but 
my acquaintance did not generate any desire 
for familiarity with fangs and rattles, or dis- 
tended heads and forked, darting tongues. A 
mere glance, as my eye flashed across the 
dusky little crack or fissure, carried to my 
brain the impression of a wide-open, repul- 
sive reptile mouth within three inches of my 
bare straining fingers ! nor was the glimpse, 
though momentary, too slight to fix forever in 
my memory a certain deadly, swaying motion 
which always immediately precedes the stroke 
of a venomous snake. In the course of the 
merest fraction of a second I recollected a 
half-dozen instances of death from the fang- 
wounds of Crotalus or of Toxicophis, and an 
exhaustive anticipation of the throes of disso- 
lution I experienced to the full. Yet it was 
not a snake, after all ! So inexplicable are the 
tricks of the human brain, so strange are the 
sudden flashes of what one might almost dare 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 165 

call intuitive knowledge, that it is not possible 
to say what value should be set upon mere 
impressions such as that little gaping flesh-red 
and yellow mouth left indelibly burned in my 
memory. Science is plodding on towards the 
solution of such questions as I here raise. 
With the eyes of a healthy, impressible, imag- 
inative child I had seen a young bird gaping 
over the rim of its nest, stolidly greedy for a 
worm, and instantly I had grasped, without 
knowing it, one of the most fascinating prob- 
lems of life. 

It is the fashion for scientists to pretend to 
ignore the value of the imagination, and to 
loudly bawl for facts ; but all the knowing ones 
wink under their bonnets and furtively indulge 
in sublime guessing wherever the limitations 
of knowledge are not set within the domain of 
exactitude. Of course it would not become 
me to say that a palaeozoic fish cannot be de- 
scribed accurately with no data at hand save 
the fragment of a doubtful fin-spine upon 
which to build the perfect anatomy, for has 
not this been done, or something very like it ? 
Still a rather lawless imagination can easily 
enjoy the consternation with which certain 
palaeontological pictures might be viewed by 
their draughtsmen if the original whole could 
suddenly appear in the place of the precious 
fossil fragment. On the other hand, however, 
some of the guesses of the comparative an- 
atomists may be flashes of truth revealed to 
genius — that is to a simple and healthy mind. 

It was years after my boyish adventure on the 
cliffside that I recalled with startling vividness 
its strange effect. Meantime I had been into 
geology and biology and their cognate sciences, 



1 66 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

and had studied with especial care and inter- 
est the subject of fossil birds. It now seemed 
to me that my child-eyes had, in their swift 
glance, seen far past that gaping young bird — 
far past Archceopteryx and Odontopteryx and 
Ichthyornis — to the original ancestor of the bird, 
the ancient, honorable and unknown reptile. 
I had received an impression of the archetype. 
Sit down in the woods of spring-time and 
listen to the brown-thrush or the cat-bird or, 
better still, the mocking-bird, singing in the 
fragrant boscage, and you may be sure that 
you hear a lyre thousands upon thousands of 
years old. The earth was a grand and beauti- 
ful ball of water and forests and grassy plains, 
with swarms of birds and insects, and legions 
of wild beasts and myriads of reptiles, a 
long, dreamy, odorous and tuneful age before 
man stood up in presence of his Maker and 
was called good. It would be charming, if 
one could but have the record of the ages all 
arranged, to read the bird-songs backward (as 
one may read backward through the songs of 
man) to their first bubblings in the oldest 
groves. Where was the first blue-bird song 
uttered ? Where did the cerulean wings first 
tremble among the young leaves of spring ? 
It is said that science and poetry are not 
friends, that they refuse to walk arm in arm, 
that they scorn each other ; yet to my mind 
science seems to dig up the freshest germs of 
poesy, and to set free the eternal essences of 
that creative force which electrifies and puts 
in motion the dormant functions of genius. 
Facts are dry enough and the jargon of the 
doctors is not suited to enrich the poet's vo- 
cabulary, but between the facts hovers the 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 167 

rare, pungent-, strangely powerful suggestive- 
ness of that which fills the atmosphere sur- 
rounding facts. The chief fallacy of the scien- 
tific attitude is that which leans with confi- 
dence on the prosy for the sake of its prose, 
at the same time shrinking from the poetical 
on account of its poetry. The geologist feels 
in some way honor-bound to avoid coming to 
a picturesque conclusion with his catalogue of 
facts. The catalogue must remain a catalogue. 
A sense of shame would accompany any 
thought of connecting imagination with his 
theory of the record of the rocks. 

But, despite the geologists, there is a great 
deal of picturesqueness and poetry in the dis- 
closures of the fossil beds. Set in matrices of 
carbonate of lime, magnesia, silica, and the 
oxides of iron, one may find the compressed 
and fragmentary remains of a life that flour- 
ished before our hills and mountains were 
made. This is a statement as trite, dry, and 
lifeless as the fossils themselves. But when 
one comes upon a mass of feathers disposed 
about a strange bird-skeleton imbedded in rock 
many thousands of years old, one may as well 
think of what song Archceopteryx sang as of 
what food it ate, or of how it used its long ver- 
tebrate tail. What colors had its wings and 
breast and crest ? Were the rectrices that 
flared out on each side of the twenty vertebrae 
of that strange tail dyed with rainbow hues ? 
These are the questions with which the scien- 
tist is ashamed to play ; but the poet may ask 
them of the rocks, and work out the answers, 
by the rules of the imagination, to his fullest 
satisfaction. 

In accordance with some unchangeable law 



1 68 BV- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

of the scientific guild, all the beauty of our age 
must needs be traced back to an almost de- 
moniac source in the palaeozoic gardens of 
monsters, where birds had awful teeth, and 
where hideous saurian-like beings had wings 
with which to flap wildly through the poison- 
ous air.- Unfortunately enough the rocks 
grimly stand up, and testify for the theory of 
the scientists with a persistence and a lack of 
poetical appreciation of the beautiful truly ex- 
asperating. That there were, in those days 
when nature was over lusty and young, birds, 
fishes and reptiles fearfully and wonderfully 
made, cannot be for a moment doubted. It 
would look, to one not thoroughly learned in 
the records of the palaeozoic ages, as if the 
creative power had been feeling its way, hesi- 
tating here, faltering there, gathering confi- 
dence from experience, and slowly finding out 
the precious secrets of life-development. 

Here and there, at wide intervals, as regards 
both space and time, the rocks give up bird- 
notes, so ta speak. The poet may, by holding 
his ear close to the strange, blurred impres- 
sions in the stones, hear the cries, the hoarse 
screams, the clanging trumpet-blasts of the 
huge land-birds and water-fowl that haunted 
the woods and streams and seas in that time 
when nearly the whole earth was a tropical re- 
gion. He may hear the twitter of sparrows, 
too, and the careless laugh of the kingfisher. 

The slab containing the remains of Archce- 
opteryx is in the British Museum. It is an ob- 
long piece of lithographic slate. The shreds 
of the bird lie thereon in such confusion as 
would mark the spot where an owl or a gos- 
hawk had eaten a blue-jay. The bones of the 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 169 

head and of the sternum are not all present, 
but the fragmentary wings lie in place, and one 
leg with the foot attached is crooked back be- 
side the long twenty-jointed tail. The feath- 
ers are unmistakably those of a flying bird, 
and the feet are formed for tree life. It must 
have been a most remarkable figure in the air, 
especially if its plumage was gay-colored, wdth 
its long, wriggling caudal streamer floating 
out. behind, and its claw-tipped wings spread 
on 'either side of its reptile-like body. One 
may assume that its voice was a blending of 
the tones of a toad and the notes of a crow— 
the first rude elements of song. Almost un- 
imaginable ages have passed since the last sur- 
viving Archceopteryx was caught in a rock ma- 
trix and forced to mould a cast for the delecta- 
tion of poets and scientists. Indeed we must 
refrain from attempting to span the gulf of 
time between this lone relic and the next bird- 
trace appearing in the earth's formations. No 
more feathered vertebrate tails come to light. 
Lapsing on towards the perfect form, the bird- 
life, like that of certain reptiles, sloughed the 
heavy caudal appendage and gathered closer 
together the chief centres of its animal struct- 
ure. From the cretaceous formation of the 
rocks, forward to the most recent disclosures 
of the caves and peat bogs, this change seems 
to have gone hand in hand with a general re- 
modelling of the whole sphere of mundane life. 
For a vast period of time it appears that the 
birds flourished, in monstrous development of 
beak and teeth, the devouring demons of land 
and sea. The eocene rocks furnish a wealth 
of fragmentary fossils suggesting a variety of 
bird-forms, mostly of giant size, waders and 



I70 B V- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

swimmers as well as flyers, some of them with 
jaws full of powerful teeth. It is in this period 
that nature has made indelible sketches on the 
rocks, lithographic studies of her great future 
work, so to speak ; work that man is now so 
recklessly destroying forever. In England 
the eocene has furnished a hint of the king- 
fishers and the heron family. In France most 
interesting discoveries have been made in the 
Paris basin, and in formations of the same 
horizon. Fossil feathers, fragmentary skele- 
tons, and even eggs, have been found, the last 
mentioned in the marl deposits near Aix in 
Provence. From lacustral beds in Auvergne 
and Bourbonnais a great number of birds have 
come to light, nearly fifty distinct species hav- 
ing been described. The marl of Ronzon has 
given up an ancient plover, a gull, and a fla- 
mingo, very different from presently existing 
species. 

Coming to our own country we step at once 
amongst the choicest records of the rocks. 
Beginning with the Jurassic formation, we find 
in the upper beds of the period in Wyoming 
the remains of a bird somewhat larger than 
our well-known great blue heron {Ardea hera- 
dias). It was probably a toothed bird, but re- 
sembled the Ratitce in other respects, and was, 
perhaps, not a flyer. 

The cretaceous birds of America all appear 
to be aquatic, and comprise some eight or a 
dozen genera, and many species. Professor 
Marsh and others have found in Kansas a 
large number of most interesting fossil birds, 
one of them, a gigantic loon-like creature, six 
feet in length from beak to toe, taken from the 
yellow chalk of the Smoky-Hill river region 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 171 

and from calcareous shale near Fort Wallace, 
is named Hesperornis regalis. Under the gen- 
eric name Hesperotmis have been grouped a 
number of species represented by skeletons 
more or less lacking completeness, but nearly 
enough perfect to show their affinities. A 
genus Ichthyornis of most remarkable toothed 
birds has been found in the middle cretaceous 
rocks of Northwestern Kansas, and a number 
of interesting remains have been taken from 
the green sand and marl beds in New Jersey. 
It would not serve any purpose to catalogue 
here all the known fossil birds. I have hastily 
sketched a broken outline by way of preface, 
leading up to what geologists call the tertiary 
rocks. Here we find the true ancestry of our 
present birds — the rocks begin to sing and 
twitter and chirp. Now we hear a far-away 
chorus, the morning voices from the old, old 
woods. A very breath of flowers and foliage 
is suggested. 

In the Museum of the Boston Society of 
Natural History is preserved a beautiful speci- 
men from the insect-bearing-shale of Colorado, 
containing a nearly complete skeleton (with 
feather impressions of wings and tail) of a 
bird belonging to the " oscine division of the 
Passeres,^' a division which contains all the 
singing birds now existing. This discovery of 
an oscine bird in the fossil form, dating far 
back of the age of man, leads the poet, not the 
scientist, to ask whether it may not be possi- 
ble, and even probable, that some of the more 
ancient fossil birds had that peculiar structure 
of the lower larynx, or syrinx^ necessary to the 
songster. The oscines are not toothed birds, 
and teeth have been considered an index of a 



172 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

low order of birds ; but, on the other hand, 
perfectly formed wings and a well-keeled ster- 
?i2im are the salients of the highest bird-develop- 
ment, and Ichthyornis had these, despite its 
teeth and fishy vertebrae. I venture to suspect 
that if a fairly preserved fossil skeleton, includ- 
ing the bill, of a poll parrot could be found in 
any of the mesozoic formations, no scientist 
would be able, without any knowledge of the 
parrot family save what the fossil afforded, to 
discover the bird's curious vocal gifts. 

The perching feet of Archceopteryx would 
give it a leading characteristic of the passeres, 
and it may have had the syrinx of the oscifies, 
despite its vertebrate, lizard-like tail ; and so, 
too, Ichthyornis^ notwithstanding its reptile 
jaws and teeth and its bi-concave vertebrce, 
may have been able to sing divinely. It was 
a small bird, scarcely larger than a pigeon, 
with a skeleton closely similar to those of the 
highest ornithological types, saving the teeth and 
bi-C07icave vertebrce ; and who shall dispute that 
such a creature might have made the woods 
ring with its voice. True, it has been thought 
an aquatic bird, simply because the formation 
in which its remains rested is of marine ori- 
gin, and on account of its teeth. There have 
been great changes, great progress and great 
retrogression, since the middle cretaceous pe- 
riod ; but my suggestion is complete without 
knowing or caring about the voice of Ichthy- 
ornis. I have traced bird-song back into the 
mesozoic age, and have set the music of the 
rocks to ringing in the ears of my imaginative 
readers. If, as embryology appears to teach, 
the birds have come through the fish and rep- 
tile forms to their present beautiful state, by 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 173 

some processes of progressive evolution, the 
fact does not conflict with my dream. It 
would seem that nature has often turned back 
from a partly accomplished purpose, as if upon 
discovering a shorter and better way, and it 
may be that the voices of nightingale and 
mocking-bird have not yet reached the perfec- 
tion belonging to some singer of aeons ago. The 
syrinx of ArchcEOpteryx may have been perfect, 
and yet the bird itself, with its cumbersome 
vertebrate appendage, may have been cast 
aside in order to begin another line of experi- 
ment, so to speak, in the direction of physical 
harmony. In such case the process would 
probably begin from the first again. It may 
appear that this really did take place ; for note 
that, after a vast geological space of time fol- 
lowing the extermination of the highly organ- 
ized Archceopteryx, we see the lower orders 
caught in the grip of the rocks, as if nature 
were again toiling up, but by a different route, 
to reach the level of the oscines, which appears 
to have been accomplished when the PalcEO- 
spiza bella came forth in the tertiary age. This 
species, buried in the shale amidst the insects 
upon which it used to feed, may be taken as a 
type of the fossil song-bird and should have 
been named simply Melospiza, as the first of 
that genus and of the family Fringillidce, just 
as we say, Adam or Eve ! 

When we come to think of it, it is next to 
miraculous that any traces of the palaeozoic 
birds are left to us at all. Can we well con- 
ceive how a sparrow or a blue-jay of our time 
shall be imprisoned in earth so as to be quar- 
ried out of a stone-bed some millions of years 
hence? Let us pause and reflect a moment 



174 BY-WAYS A ND BIRD- NO TES. 

and we shall begin to wonder how so many re- 
mains of so-called aquatic birds found their 
way into the middle cretaceous beds of Kansas 
and Texas. Surely there must have been 
myriads of birds in those days, else nature had 
a better way then than now of taking her 
dead into her bosom ? 

The lower tertiary rocks of Wyoming Terri- 
tory have given up an ancient woodpecker, 
Uintvrfiis lucaris, a small species, not larger 
than our flicker. He it was who drummed on 
the dead trees in the lonely places of the woods 
ages before the first germ that foreshadowed 
man was forming under the smile of God. 

Many of the ancient aquatic birds may have 
built their nests in burrows, as our kingfishers 
do, and various accidents may have shut them 
up forever in their dens. It can be under- 
stood how the belted halcyon of to-day might 
be hermetically sealed in his burrow by the 
earth falling in upon him. Still I have heard 
of but a single bone-fragment (amongst all the 
fossil remains of birds) that has been referred 
to the kingfisher, which argues that Halcyon 
is a new bird in comparison with others exist- 
ing at this time, or else we have not yet 
chanced to cut into the banks of the old, old 
brooks where he used to dig out the burrow 
for his nest. 

What have been called sub-fossil remains 
furnish us a number of giant birds from the 
sands of Madagascar and from New Zealand. 
So also the peat-bogs and fens hold the bones 
of rare or extinct species, principally herons 
and bitterns. 

Since we have been forced to study orni- 
thology backwards, we may be said to have 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 175 

just now reached the hither confine of the 
ancient domain of the birds. A mere outcrop 
here, a quarry there, with now and then a rail- 
way-cutting or a mining-drift or shaft, can 
afford no more than casual glimpses of what is 
pictured in the rocks. With PalcEOSpiza as 
the initial, or rather the closing sketch, what if 
we could thumb the pages back through all 
the forms to Archceopteryx and beyond, should 
we not have a volume of almost weirdly unique 
impressions ! I have imagined that we should, 
in fact, find a long series of editions of the 
same volume, amended, remodelled, revised, 
but ever showing the same great development 
purpose. The owl was before Minerva, music 
was before Pan, beauty was before Venus, 
love was before the woman was made for 
Adam ; the spirit of God walked in the dawn. 
The labors of A. Milne-Edwards have, to 
my mind, opened mines of rich suggestion to 
the poet as well as the philosopher and scien- 
tist, and I am sure that there is as much stim- 
ulus for the imagination as there is food for 
the mere reason in the discoveries of Prof. 
Marsh. And yet I cannot join the group who 
regard science as the basis of future poetry. 
It is not science, but the atmosphere of sug- 
gestion that stirs the pages of science, that is 
generative of poetry. If genius cannot see 
past the hard, dry fossils of to-day, far back 
into the living by-gone and catch those tints 
that are faded forever from sea and land, then 
genius fails at the cheapest test. It is a func- 
tion of science to restore the lost head and 
breast bones to Archceopteryx^ but it is the 
privilege of the poet to restore the colors to its 
feathers and to "flood its throat with song." 



176 BV-IVAVS AJVjD BIRD-NO TES. 

I have an exalted admiration of science, and 
place sincere trust in the outcome of its inves- 
tigations ; but I also sympathize most cordially 
with him who wishes he could have angled for 
Devonian fishes, or who sighs at the thought 
of the bird-songs of the earth's morning 
twilight. 

But to return to our text. The curious sug- 
gestiveness of these fossil fragments of birds 
is not common to all the organic remains in 
the rocks. The cast of a delicate wing-feather 
in the shale of the hills, is a fertilizer of the 
mind and a generator of strange visions. 
How far that little quill has been borne down 
the current of time ! Where was the nest with 
its soft lining and its wonder of green or blue 
or marbled eggs ? Did the fragrant leaves 
droop over and the May-wind breathe around.'' 
Was there a brook hard by with its painted 
pebbles and its liquid music ? Why was there 
no sun-burnt boy — no bare-foot girl — no cabin 
on the hill ? I know a sportsman or two 
whom it would delight to shoot over a middle 
cretaceous marsh or shore-meadow where a 
good bag of Apatornis and Ichthyornis might 
be had ! What a picnic it would be if one 
could prepare an ample luncheon and invite 
professors Gray, Coulter, Lesquereux, and 
many others to meet one in a jungle of the 
great Western Coal Basin before it was sub- 
merged ! What botanizing there would be ! 
As for me, I should like to tramp with Dr. 
Elliott Coues in the haunts of ArchcEOpieryx ! 
Let him collect skins while I make sketches ; 
let him dissect fresh subjects while I listen to 
the voices of the strange wilderness. I should 
like to see the pollen of earth's first flowers 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. ^11 

upon my shoes, and hear the runic notes that 
have ripened into the song of the mocking- 
bird and the brown-thrush. 

Below the surface of Professor Huxley's 
comparisons of the Birds and the Reptiles 
there is a strong current of most fascinating 
poetry flowing back over the fossil-bearing 
rocks. I take it that the first men were much 
nearer to Nature than we are. It may be that 
an hereditary far-fetched memory (so to speak) 
of winged monsters, suggested the dragons 
and griffins of early song. The crude but per- 
fectly natural imaginings of the savages of to- 
day, as well as the refined fantasies of the an- 
cients, seem to smack of this lingering hered- 
itament transmitted through a thousand 
changes from the lower estate. Pan, the goat- 
footed musician, is scarcely less monstrous, 
when we view him soberly, than many of the 
beings shut up in the stones. 

Mr. Seeley has described a most interesting 
bird of the eocene period, named Odontopteryx 
toliapicus, probably a fish-eater, having -nearly 
the habits of a cormorant, whose mouth was 
rimmed with bony teeth set in the powerful 
jaws An expression of savage fierceness and 
voracity has clung to this bird's head-bones 
through countless ages of change. Not even 
the relentless grip of the rocks for a million 
of years could entirely quench the demoniac 
spirit of the creature. In what sea or lake or 
stream did it strike its prey? On what windy 
ocean crag did it rear its clamorous brood ? 
I should like to have a look at its nest, if only 
to compare it with those of the fish-eaters of 
to-day, but much better should I enjoy a sail on 
the waters it haunted, with the wind on my 



178 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 

cheek and the sharp fragrance of the salt 
marshes in my nostrils. 

Some say that the poetry of the future will 
be the songs of science, that we are now in 
the state of transition from romance to the 
real. So be it if it must ; but after all I should 
rather sing with my face to the front, if I were 
a poet. Science is noble and good, but the 
progress of the soul is better. Genius is a 
bird of morning, and its song is always the ex- 
ponent of the most recent pulse of human pas- 
sion, human knowledge of beauty, human 
sympathy with the joys and sorrows of the 
world. The rocks may give up the last secret 
of their hearts ; the sea, too, may disgorge its 
treasures ; but at last it is the soul of man that 
is the poet's field of study — the soul that 
walked with God upon chaos in the dark hour 
before the dawn of creation, the soul that still 
walks with him as the morning twilight slowly 
broadens into perfect day. It is this soul that 
longs backward and longs forward for the un- 
known, haunted all the time with some dreamy 
memory of its ancient chrysalis state, and feel- 
ing all the time how close it is approaching to 
the hour when its wings shall be full-grown. 

Much has been spoken and written to dem- 
onstrate that the revelation of the rocks is or is 
not in conflict with the revelations of the Bible. 
To me the whole discussion has the ring of 
blasphemy. Let science go on enlightening 
our minds and let Christianity go on making 
glorious the paths of men. There is room 
and great need for both. Walking between 
the two, with a hand on the shoulder of either, 
let poesy gather the bird-songs and perfumes 



BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 179 

of all the woods and fields from the beginning 
to the end of time. 

It is because colors have such priceless value 
in the composition of the beauty our souls 
crave, and because music, such as the birds 
make in the dewy woods of May, goes so far 
towards filling the human heart with happi- 
ness, that I close this paper with the questions : 

What colors had the plumage of Archceo- 
pteryx ? 

What song did FalcBOspiza sing ? 



THE END. 



Cv^. 



LIBRARY OF C0NGREc;«5 

^6g 902 2 # 




